Create an ephemeral minikube local dev environment with podman

Install devbox

macOS

Install vfkit if using macOS

brew tap cfergeau/crc
brew install vfkit

This configuration has only been tested on macOS:

• Darwin Kernel Version 23.4.0 x86_64 and Darwin Kernel Version 23.2.0 arm64.
• Running a linux VM in Virutalbox 7.0.18 or qemu-system-x86_64 on macOS is not supported. qemu in the VM requires the kvm kernel module issue.

On macOS Podman is running in rootful mode because the minikube ingress doesn't work in rootless created issue. Using the containerd runtime instead of cri-o with rootful podman as suggested here the cri-o container runtime will error when executing minikube image build. Using a single node minikube cluster because some examples would have issues when tunneling to the exposed service when executing minikube service <app_name> --profile devenv.

chromeOS

This configuration was tested with the launch of a new linux development environment container with a 30GB disk:

• Linux penguin 6.6.25-01713-g2f237acc8e50
• Install libvirt based on these minikube directions

sudo apt install -y libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system uidmap

On chromeOS minikube uses the kvm2 driver and the initialization of the cluster will replace the /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf file. Podman setup will update /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid and create the file /etc/containers/policy.json and /etc/containers/registries.conf

Activate devbox

The following command will install the nix package manager, download all the packages listed in the devbox.json and place you in the devbox shell. The first execution will be time consuming because of the nix setup and package downloads.

devbox shell

This demo assumes that podman and minikube are not installed on your OS. go-task is used to abstract common commands. A custom KUBECONFIG file will be generated and used for this demo.

task --list

The default init for macOS

task devenv-init

The default init for chromeOS

task devenv-init-chromeOS

To destroy the cluster on macOS

task devenv-destroy

To destroy the cluster on chromeOS

task devenv-destroy-chromeOS

If minikube is unresponsive on macOS, this will kill the podman and vfkit processes, force remove the podman machine and cleanup the minikube config.

task devenv-hung

TODO

• Test on Windows and Linux running on bare metal.
• Update Taskfile config to allow for specific tasks inside of projects.
• Update Taskfile so podman system migrate isn't run on every chromeOS init.
• task devenv-status should display a better message.
• Update documentation to caputure minikube tunnel differences between macOS and chromeOS.
• Update simple-webapp.yaml ingress hostname depending OS type.
• Research chromeOS configuration to allow access to minikube from the browser.