Minikube volumes

Question

Minikube is supposed to make it simple to run Kubernetes locally, not only for "getting started" but also for "day-to-day development workflows".

source : https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/blob/master/ROADMAP.md#goals

But I can also read that : "PersistentVolumes are mapped to a directory inside the minikube VM. The Minikube VM boots into a tmpfs, so most directories will not be persisted across reboots (minikube stop)"

source : https://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/minikube/#persistent-volumes

So what if my developments need persistent storage (MySQL database, mongodb database, ...) ? Do I need to throw my Minikube and install directly the full Kubernetes ?

Answer 1

This is covered in the documentation. The relevant section starts right after the sentence that you've already quoted:

However, Minikube is configured to persist files stored under the following host directories:

• /data
• /var/lib/localkube
• /var/lib/docker

Here is an example PersistentVolume config to persist data in the ‘/data’ directory:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: pv0001
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  capacity:
    storage: 5Gi
  hostPath:
    path: /data/pv0001/

Simply declare hostPath volumes that are mapped to any directory in /data on the host, and these should persist across reboots.