minikube

minikube command [options]

minikube provisions and runs a local single-node (or small multi-node) Kubernetes cluster suitable for development, learning, and CI. It abstracts the underlying compute platform: depending on the --driver flag it can spin up a VM (kvm2, virtualbox, hyperkit, qemu) or a container (docker, podman) hosting the Kubernetes components, then writes a context to ~/.kube/config so kubectl can target the cluster transparently.Minikube ships with optional addons (ingress, metrics-server, registry, storage-provisioner) that can be enabled with minikube addons enable. The service and tunnel commands bridge cluster networking to the host so applications running inside the cluster are reachable from the developer's machine.Multiple clusters can coexist via --profile, each with its own VM, addons, and kubeconfig context.

start

Create and start the local Kubernetes cluster.

Stop the cluster while preserving its state.

Delete the cluster, releasing all VM and disk resources.

Show the status of host, kubelet, apiserver, and kubeconfig.

Launch the Kubernetes web dashboard.

Open a shell on the underlying VM or container.

Print the URL of a Kubernetes service, optionally opening it in the browser.

Manage built-in addons (ingress, metrics-server, registry, ...).

Create a network route into the cluster for LoadBalancer services.

Switch between named clusters managed by minikube.

Select the hypervisor or runtime: docker, podman, kvm2, hyperkit, virtualbox, qemu, vfkit, parallels, hyperv, none.

Number of CPUs allocated to the node.

Amount of RAM in MB (or with suffix like 4g).

Disk size for the node, e.g. 20g.

containerd (default since v1.24), cri-o, or docker.

Kubernetes release to deploy, e.g. v1.30.0.

Comma-separated list of addons to enable at start.

Display help information.

Single-node by default; multi-node clusters (--nodes=N) exist but are intended for local testing only. Resource-hungry: a typical cluster needs at least 2 CPUs and 2 GiB of RAM. The none driver runs Kubernetes directly on the host and is destructive to existing system configuration. On macOS Apple Silicon, prefer the docker, qemu, or vfkit drivers; hyperkit is x86-only.

minikube was created by the Kubernetes community to provide a reliable on-laptop development experience. It graduated from the kubernetes-incubator to the main kubernetes GitHub organization and has tracked upstream Kubernetes releases closely since version 0.1 (2016).

kubectl(1), kind(1), k3s(1), k3d(1)