A console application which is meant to be used with minikube and facilitates:

• Exposing the Kubernetes dashboard through a load balancer service
• Starting the minikube tunnel in the background
• Setting up load balancers for exposing applications from inside a Kubernetes cluster
• Setting up socat tunnels
• Mounting directories from minikube's host onto the minikube's filesystem

The following must be installed before using kube-minion.

• Docker Engine
• minikube
• kubectl
• socat
• SSH

When starting, this application does the following:

1. Checks whether or not all the prerequisites are present
2. Creates a load balancer for the Kubernetes dashboard, to be accessed at http://localhost:51515
3. Starts the minikube tunnel
4. Checks whether or not an initialization file (eg, kube-minion.json) is present
5. Starts the application's main loop

The main part of this application is basically a loop which executes the following steps:

1. Build a list of options for the user to choose from
2. Display these options
3. Let the user select an option
4. Execute the function that is related with the selected option

The options menu can be refreshed by selecting option 0.

The application ignores Ctrl-C (SIGINT), so that the user has to explicitly choose whether to clean up or not when exiting the application.

0. Refresh options
   • Start over from the top of the loop and rebuild the options list
1. Create/Delete Kubernetes dashboard load balancer
   • Creates or deletes the load balancer that exposes the Kubernetes dashboard at http://localhost:51515
2. Start/Stop minikube tunnel
   • Starts or stops the minikube tunnel
3. Set the minikube tunnel bind address
   • Sets the minikube tunnel bind address and restarts it if it is already started.
4. Create load balancer
   • Creates a Kubernetes load balancer to expose an application
   • This requires the minikube tunnel to also be running for the application to become reachable
5. List load balancers
   • Lists the Kubernetes load balancers that have been created by kube-minion
6. Delete load balancer
   • Deletes a Kubernetes load balancer that has been created by kube-minion
7. Delete all load balancers
   • Deletes all Kubernetes load balancers that have been created by kube-minion
8. Create socat tunnel
   • Creates a socat tunnel
   • This is useful when trying to access an application from the Windows environment while the application has been proxied inside WSL
9. List socat tunnels
   • Lists the socat tunnels that have been created by kube-minion
10. Delete socat tunnel
    • Deletes a socat tunnel that has been created by kube-minion
11. Delete all socat tunnels
    • Deletes all socat tunnels that have been created by kube-minion
12. Set socat default connect host
    • Sets the default socat connect host for connecting to the receiving end of the socat tunnel
    • By default, this is localhost
    • As an example, this can be used to configure kube-minion to use the required WSL interface by default
13. Create minikube mount
    • Creates a minikube mount
    • As an example, this can be used to mount a configuration or source code directory inside a pod
14. List minikube mounts
    • Lists the minikube mounts that have been created by kube-minion
15. Delete minikube mount
    • Deletes a minikube mount that has been created by kube-minion
16. Delete all minikube mounts
    • Deletes all minikube mounts that have been created by kube-minion
17. Clean up and exit
    • Deletes the load balancer that exposes the Kubernetes dashboard at http://localhost:51515
    • Deletes all Kubernetes load balancers that have been created by kube-minion
    • Deletes all socat tunnels that have been created by kube-minion
    • Deletes all minikube mounts that have been created by kube-minion
    • Exits the application
18. Exit without cleaning up
    • Exits the application without the cleaning up done by Clean up and exit
19. Clean up initialization file configuration and exit (available only when an initialization file has been found)
    • Undoes all the configuration that has been specified in the found initialization file

To see the available command line options, use kube-minion -h.

The -p | --dashboard-port command line parameter sets the port on which to expose the Kubernetes dashboard load balancer service.

The -f | --initialization-file-path command line parameter sets the initialization file from which to read initial configuration. When used, the KUBE_MINION_ENVIRONMENT environment variable is not considered.

Additionally, the application can be configured with an initialization file.

This file is a JSON file for which, a schema has been provided.

This schema exists in file kube-minion.schema.json and an exhaustive template exists in file kube-minion.template.json.

The initialization file is expected to be found in the same directory as the one in which kube-minion has been started in.

This file can configure the following:

• Load balancers to expose applications that run in minikube's Kubernetes cluster.
• socat tunnels
• The default socat connect host at the tunnel's receiving end
• minikube mounts

This environment variable makes kube-minion search for an initialization file with a name of kube-minion.$KUBE_MINION_ENVIRONMENT.json, instead of the default name of kube-minion.json.