How to Run Minishift On MacOSX

Minishift allows running a mini-version of Openshift cluster locally for convenience of development and debug. This blog is going through how to run minishift on MacOS.

Step1 – Download latest Minishift

Goto Mnishift Github Release Page, it is able to see the binary assets of Minishift for different operation systems. By writing this article, the latest versino of Minishift for MacOS is minishift-1.17.0-darwin-amd64.tgz.

Once downloaded, expand the tar file and copy the minishift file to /usr/local/bin folder

# untar the downloaded file
tar -xvf ~/Downloads/<downloaded file>

sudo cp ~/Downloads/<expanded folder>/minishift /usr/local/bin

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/minishift

Step2 – Install dependencies / Virtualization Environment

Before Minishift can run, we need setup the virualization environment which supports Openshift running under MacOS environment.

When doing this step, I assum you have brew installed /configured correctly in your computer.

You can simply copy and paste code below and run in a terminal.

# Update brew first
brew update
# install docker-machine-driver-xhyve
brew install docker-machine-driver-xhyve
# Set the owner User ID (SUID) for the binary 
sudo chmod u+s $(brew --prefix)/opt/docker-machine-driver-xhyve/bin/docker-machine-driver-xhyve

Step 3 – Run minishift

Once setup virtualization environment successfully, let’s start minishift:

minishift start

For first time running, it will download all related dependencies including images / cli binary .

After starting successfully, it is able to see the allocated IP address to the master node of the openshift cluster. In my case it is 192.168.64.2.

Then you should be able to open https://192.168.64.2:8443 in your browser and login with username and password both as admin.

To shutdown your minishift cluster simply run:

minishift stop