Mount local directory into pod in minikube

Question

I am running minikube v0.24.1. In this minikube, I will create a Pod for my nginx application. And also I want to pass data from my local directory.

That means I wan

Answer 1

You can't mount your local directory into your Pod directly.

First, you need to mount your directory $HOME/go/src/github.com/nginx into your minikube.

$ minikube start --mount-string="$HOME/go/src/github.com/nginx:/data"

Then If you mount /data into your Pod using hostPath, you will get you local directory data into Pod.

There is another way

Host's $HOME directory gets mounted into minikube's /hosthome directory. Here you will get your data

$ ls -la /hosthome/go/src/github.com/nginx

So to mount this directory, you can change your Pod's hostPath

hostPath:
  path: /hosthome/go/src/github.com/nginx

Answer 2

I found a way.

This way you can directly mount directory to container. You do not have to mount your directory to minikube first.

We can specify the directory we want to add into container by using hostPath in volumes

  volumeMounts:
    - name: crypto-config
      mountPath: <PATH IN CONTAINER>
    - name: channel-artifacts
      mountPath: /opt/gopath/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric/peer/channel-artifacts
    - name: chaincode
      mountPath: /opt/gopath/src/github.com/chaincode
  volumes:
    - name: crypto-config
      hostPath:
        path: <YOUR LOCAL DIR PATH>
    - name: channel-artifacts
      hostPath:
        path: /Users/akshaysood/Blockchain/Kubernetes/Fabric/network/channel-artifacts
    - name: chaincode
      hostPath:
        path: /Users/akshaysood/Blockchain/Kubernetes/Fabric/network/chaincode

Answer 3

to check which passes are mounted in the minikube run minikube ssh and then ls -la

Answer 4

After struggling to do this for an hour & reviewing these answers, I got something slightly similar to work:

First off, I am running minikube with virtualbox as the driver.

minikube version
minikube version: v1.9.2

My start command: minikube start --mount=true --mount-string=$(HOME)/somedir/on/host/:/somedir/on/vm/

If you are struggling with this, I highly suggest running minikube help to see what the flags are. I suspect these could be changing for different versions/builds.

---

If you're looking to get this mounted directory into your pods, you must then establish a volume and volume mount in a manifest file. Here's a simplified version of mine.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
...
---

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
...
spec:
  replicas: 1
  ...
  template:
    ...
    spec:
      containers:
      ...
      volumeMounts:
      - name: someName
        mountPath: /somedir/on/vm/
    ...
    volumes:
    - name: someName
      hostPath:
        path: /somedir/on/vm/

Hopefully the extra polish, details and organization helps other people move a little faster on this.

---

Revisiting this as it seems other people like it: If you are tied to pure minikube, I'd suggest using the above, but I have found much better ways to locally develop minikube clusters using skaffold and docker for mac. Docker for mac can run a minikube like k8s cluster locally (in containers) using your local machine's docker daemon (so mounting files and such is a breeze). It is lovely and using it with skaffold makes hot reload and all other heavenly features possible. Do check those technologies out if you're not satisfied with the heaviness of minikube.

Answer 5

I tried out aerokite's solution, but found out that I had to pass --mount as well as --mount-string "local-path:minikube-path" to mount a directory in minikube.

minikube start --mount-string ${HOME}/go/src/github.com/nginx:/data --mount. Spent some time figuring this out.

Answer 6

For an already running minikube you can do the following:

nohup minikube mount <host-directory-path>:<desired-minikube-directory-path> &