Normally, Minikube runs a single-node cluster inside a virtual machine (VM), and this requires the installation of a hypervisor like VirtualBox or KVM. This requires a lot of setting up and is not great for performance.
Instead, we can instruct Minikube to run Kubernetes components directly on our machine outside of any VMs. This requires the Docker runtime and Docker Machine to be installed on our machine. Docker runtime should already be installed if you followed our previous chapter, so let's install Docker Machine:
$ base=https://github.com/docker/machine/releases/download/v0.14.0 &&
curl -L $base/docker-machine-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) >/tmp/docker-machine &&
sudo install /tmp/docker-machine /usr/local/bin/docker-machine
After installation, run docker-machine version to confirm that the installation was successful:
$ docker-machine version
docker-machine version 0.14.0, build 89b8332
Running your cluster with Minikube on Docker is only available on Linux machines. If you are not using a Linux machine, go to the Minikube documentation to follow instructions on setting up a VM environment and using a VM driver. The rest of the chapter will still work for you. Just remember to use the correct --vm-driver flag when running minikube start.