Skaffold is amazing for local development with kubernetes. I can locally test my changes without having to deploy remotely. Helping speed up local feature development and giving me more confidence in my changes. I started using Skaffold for all new projects in my current position, well for any new microservice in our ETL data pipeline and it works pretty well on a minikube cluster.

Let’s get our minikube cluster setup. Install minikube locally by using homebrew:

$ brew install minikube

Make sure it was installed successfully:

$ minikube version

Output:

minikube version: v1.27.1
commit: fe869b5d4da11ba318eb84a3ac00f336411de7ba

Start minikube:

$ minikube start --feature-gates=EphemeralContainers=true

Use the minikube addon to enable the ingress nginx controller:

$ minikube addons enable ingress

Install skaffold on your machine:

$ brew install skaffold

Validate that the install was successful:

$ skaffold version

Now run the init command:

$ skaffold init 

The init command tries to bootstrap your projects and setting it up to deploy with cli tools such as:

kubectl & kustomize

Bringing up your local cluster:

$ skaffold dev --port-forward