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 want to mount my local $HOME/go/src/github.com/nginx into my Pod

How can I do this?

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
spec:
  containers:
  - image: nginx:0.1
    name: nginx
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /data
      name: volume
  volumes:
  - name: volume
    hostPath:
      path: /data

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" --mount

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 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 3

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 4

DefaultMountDir

Minikube already mounts by default home directory to VM:

• on Mac it mounts dir of all users - /Users
• on Linux and Windows just the home of current user - homedir.HomeDir()

You can see how it does this, if you browse through Minikube sources.
Here is the search for the moment, but result might change over time:
https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/search?q=DefaultMountDir&unscoped_q=DefaultMountDir

The definition of the HomeDir() is: https://godoc.org/k8s.io/client-go/util/homedir

You can always do minikube ssh into the Minikube VM and explore it:

$ df -hl
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
...
/Users          466G  442G   25G  95% /Users

As Minikube is a single node Kubernetes cluster, you can then mount /Users/... inside your pods.

Recommended way

minikube mount /path/to/dir/to/mount:/vm-mount-path is the recommended way to mount directories into minikube so that they can be used in your local Kubernetes cluster. The command works on all supported platforms.

See documentation and example: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/tasks/mount/

Answer 5

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 6

For an already running minikube you can do the following:

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

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

Not sure if I joined the party late but I did a root:root mapping by doing following command:

minikube start --mount-string="/:/"

This just will just mount your local file system root to minikube and keeps things seamless between the systems.Hope it helps.

Answer 9

Provided answers are correct, but since I'm a beginner to k8s it's taking time to understand what happening. So I just updated the answer.

We can't directly mount local directory to your pod directory.

So, we're doing following things;

1. Mounting data to minikube's data directory
2. Through manifest.yml file we're copying data from minikube's data directory to pod's directory

For step-1:

 Sx: minikube start --mount --mount-string localpath-for-your-file:data
 Ex: minikube start --mount --mount-string ~/Desktop/data1:/data 

In the above command we’re saving data to minikube’s data folder not inside of your pod. ~ symbol represents root user directory i.e. home/user_name so we can use ~ symbol or we’ve to give full path. You can check this from minikube ssh command.

According to my ubuntu system I've to run following commands inside minikube ssh shell:

df
cd /dev
cd ..
ls 
cd data
ls

For step-2: Here we've to provide volume details in our manifest.yml file

volumes:
  - name: minimountdata
    hostPath:
      path: /data 
      # this is the root path for your minikube directory where you copied the code from your local system, 
#by running the command:=> minikube start --mount --mount-string ~/Desktop/data1:/data 
containers:
  - name: django-client 
  image: django-client-service
  ports:
  - containerPort: 5000
  imagePullPolicy: Never
  volumeMounts:
    - name: minimountdata
    mountPath: /demo-app/custom-addons #mountPath is the folder path in your pod