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How to Develop Locally for Kubernetes Using Skaffold and Minikube

This is a very practical tutorial. I am not going to dwell on why microservices are here to stay and why Kubernetes is a beast to set up. I am going to cut it straight to the core. You have come here for a solution to your problem, and I am going to give you one.

You are probably reading this article because your organisation is using or decided to use Kubernetes.

But you or your development team is complaining because it is hard to develop locally without wasting time with deployments(docker build, docker push, kubectl rollout, etc). What is meant to be a one-liner code change, takes several minutes to test??? That is not acceptable.

Thankfully there is a fix that will be like heaven on hell, for any developer looking to develop fast.

I introduce to you…. Minikube and Skaffold.

For this tutorial, you will be downloading a GitHub repository that I have created:

In this repository, you will find a CMS component that uses Strapi and a front end written in NodeJS. Before you get too excited about the front end… don’t.

It’s just a few lines of javascript code that retrieves data from a Strapi backend using a REST API, to prove that we are able to connect and retrieve data.

What you should be excited about, is that you should be able to start developing on Kubernetes after a few seconds by just executing a skaffold command. Of course, I am assuming you’ve already installed Minikube, Skaffold and Kustomize.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Install Docker

Use this link for detailed instructions on how to install docker:

Step 2: Install Minikube

If you are on a MacOS you will want to start Minikube in the following way:

$ minikube start --driver hyperkit --mount --mount-string /Users:/Users

By default Minikube only allocates 1GB of memory for its VM. You will need to give it more memory and possibly more CPUs. Otherwise, you will see memory errors when skaffold tries to redeploy certain containers.

Example of starting Minikube with 8GB of memory and 4 cpus:

The reason for this customised start script is so that we have a way to share files between our host and the Minikube VM. This could be useful for instance if you have a database backup with which you want to initialise Mysql. Or if you want to build a docker image directly on the docker registry in Minikube.

If you are trying to build a docker container directly from the command line then you will also want to run:

But because we are using Skaffold to do the heavy lifting for us, this will not be necessary for us. Anyways, I have created a 5 min youtube video to explain how you would do that if you need to. Click the link below to watch.

Step 3: Install Skaffold

Step 4: Install standalone Kustomize

Minikube ships with Kustomize, which is integrated into the kubectl command.
Unfortunately, Skaffold only works with the standalone version of Kustomize. So you will need to download and install Kustomize.

Step 5: Download the example strapi project

Step 6: Modify overlays/dev/mysqlbackup-volumes.yml

Provide a full path to the db folder, which contains the DB dump.

Step 7: Modify overlays/dev/strapi.yml

Provide a full path to the cms/persistent folder, which contains a copy of an example strapi schema.

Do you have a suggestion on how to make this better? I would love to hear your feedback.

Step 8: Start Skaffold

Note that Skaffold will continue running until you do Ctrl-C to terminate. At that point, it cleans up any pods, volumes or any resources that were created to deploy the app to Minikube.

You will see some Mysql connection errors at the start of skaffold. This is because the MySQL pod takes a bit longer to be available then the CMS strapi component. The CMS pod tries to connect to the MySQL database and since it is unable to, it crashes. Kubernetes is smart enough to restart the pod. Eventually, the errors will disappear and all the pods will be in the running state.

In a production environment, this crash behaviour is not ideal as it generates large amounts of unsightly errors. But hey, we are not looking to use this for production!

Step 9: Retrieve the URL for the CMS and the Front end

If all goes well, you will have 3 pods running, and 3 persistence volumes.

To access the CMS and the front end you will need to call:

The URLs above are unique to your environment.

You are ready to develop now. Access the front end URL and you should be able to see the following screen:

It is not an amazing front end but you could improve it. For example, you could a title to the page in server.js.

You will notice that once you change the file, it will be automatically copied to the pod and Nodejs will restart automatically(using nodemon). This, without having to rebuild a new docker image.

So literally you can develop and see your changes instantaneously appear. This can save months of development potentially.

Let us access the Strapi CMS and add an extra restaurant.

The username and password you will need to use are:

username: admin@example.com
password: aZrnkuyQRbt9zgP

This is a generated password and doesn’t match any of my existing passwords. Just saying it… I trust you all ;)

Click on Restaurants at the top left.

Add a new Restaurant, and assign it to an existing category. You can be as creative as you wish with your restaurant and description.

You should have now two restaurants:

Lets now refresh the front end.

You can see now that there are two restaurants being displayed in our rough front end.

The github repository, which by now, I hope, is bookmarked, has some important configuration files:

This file configures Skaffold so that it understands how to build our Strapi application. Here I tell it where it can find the Dockerfiles and where to look for environment configuration.

Note the sync section on each docker image section. This sync section does all the magic that we need to copy our changes to the docker containers without having to rebuild and redeploy a docker image. That would take too much precious time as redeploying even a simple container takes at least a couple of minutes.

base/kustomize.yaml

In the base folder, you will find the kubernetes deployment templates for our application. These deployment templates are the starting point for deployments in all environments. The kustomize.yaml allows us to bundle up all the deployment yaml files together as a bundle and deploy it as a unit to kubernetes.

Each environment can have a separate folder inside overlay and that allows us to make specific changes for the Strapi application to run in specific types of environments. For example, in a local development environment, we need to use HostPath volumes to share files from our local file system with the pods. We only want this to apply to the local development environment and nowhere else.

overlays/dev/kustomization.yaml

You can see that in the dev environment we include all the configuration from the base templates and we add extra templates, for Mysql and Strapi itself to have some initial data. This is key for a developer to be quickly up and running with a local Kubernetes environment.

There is probably a lot more to be said about the code in the Git repository. But then I think it is better to let the source code to do all the talking!

If you have any questions I will try to resolve any queries!

Winter Storms Reveal Strength of Community

How to Develop Locally for Kubernetes Using Skaffold and Minikube

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