Setup: Get Your Cluster Running

Do this once — everything after this assumes it's already done.

Using our hosted environment? If you're working from the virtual machine provided through this site, skip this page entirely — minikube and kubectl are already installed and your cluster is already running. You're ready to start.

The instructions below are only for setting things up on your own machine.

If you're setting up locally and hit a snag, that's normal. Environment setup is the most boring part of any Kubernetes course, and also the part most likely to go sideways depending on your OS. Push through it once and you won't think about it again for the rest of the series.

Commands below are current as of this writing. Tools like these move fast — if something doesn't work, check minikube's own install page for your OS rather than assuming you did it wrong.

Checklist

• Docker is installed and running This course assumes you already have this from your container background. Confirm it with:

  docker --version

If that fails, stop here and get Docker installed first — everything else depends on it.

• Install minikube minikube runs a real (small) Kubernetes cluster locally, using Docker as its driver.

macOS (Homebrew):

  brew install minikube

Linux:

  curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
  sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Windows (Chocolatey):

  choco install minikube

Whichever path you took, confirm it worked:

  minikube version

• Install kubectl kubectl is how you'll talk to the cluster — it's the CLI you'll use for basically everything in this course.

macOS (Homebrew):

  brew install kubectl

Linux:

  curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
  sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Windows (Chocolatey):

  choco install kubernetes-cli

Confirm it's installed:

  kubectl version --client

• Start your cluster

  minikube start

The first run will take a few minutes — it's downloading a small VM image and setting up the cluster underneath you. Don't worry about what's happening in there yet. That's the whole point of this course.

• Confirm the cluster is alive

  kubectl get nodes

You should see one node, with a status of Ready. If you see that, your cluster is up and you're done.

Sanity check

If kubectl get nodes returns a Ready node, close this page and move on — you're deploying something in the next five minutes.

If it doesn't, the most common culprits are: Docker not running, minikube using the wrong driver, or a firewall blocking minikube's VM. Re-run minikube start, and if it still fails, minikube delete and try again clean before troubleshooting further — it's usually faster than debugging a half-started cluster.