Introducing Minikube: Run Kubernetes Locally with Ease

--- title: " Minikube: easily run Kubernetes locally " date: 2016-07-11 slug: minikube-easily-run-kubernetes-locally url: /blog/2016/07/Minikube-Easily-Run-Kubernetes-Locally author: > Dan Lorenc (Google) --- _**Editor's note:** This is the first post in a [series of in-depth articles](/blog/2016/07/five-days-of-kubernetes-1-3) on what's new in Kubernetes 1.3_ While Kubernetes is one of the best tools for managing containerized applications available today, and has been production-ready for over a year, Kubernetes has been missing a great local development platform. For the past several months, several of us from the Kubernetes community have been working to fix this in the [Minikube](http://github.com/kubernetes/minikube) repository on GitHub. Our goal is to build an easy-to-use, high-fidelity Kubernetes distribution that can be run locally on Mac, Linux and Windows workstations and laptops with a single command. Thanks to lots of help from members of the community, we're proud to announce the official release of Minikube. This release comes with support for [Kubernetes 1.3](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2016/07/kubernetes-1-3-bridging-cloud-native-and-enterprise-workloads/), new commands to make interacting with your local cluster easier and experimental drivers for xhyve (on macOS) and KVM (on Linux). **Using Minikube** Minikube ships as a standalone Go binary, so installing it is as simple as downloading Minikube and putting it on your path: Minikube currently requires that you have VirtualBox installed, which you can download [here](https://www.virtualbox.org/). _(This is for Mac, for Linux substitute “minikube-darwin-amd64” with “minikube-linux-amd64”)_curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-darwin-amd64 && chmod +x minikube && sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/_ To start a Kubernetes cluster in Minikube, use the `minikube start` command: ``` $ minikube start Starting local Kubernetes cluster... Kubernetes is available at https://192.168.99.100:443 Kubectl is now configured to use the cluster ``` ![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/UNRbuyrACtW32dxMehR7GaQlj4CaVxVmlw3UhTqzyIDBgENdT1PcXf-3RoW-T1PFhIQtBbIPq1p544NAKFMO_E_1BUx7MBpkRyw6URtv4W0xT-O4tyWDYJf3MYna6a_8cFJnVvXZ)

This blog post announces the official release of Minikube, a tool designed to provide an easy-to-use, local Kubernetes environment for Mac, Linux, and Windows. It simplifies Kubernetes development by allowing users to run a single-node cluster with a single command. The release includes support for Kubernetes 1.3, new commands for easier cluster interaction, and experimental drivers for xhyve (macOS) and KVM (Linux). The post provides simple instructions on how to install and start a Kubernetes cluster using Minikube.