Install Minikube and Docker with VirtualBox on Windows 10 Home

In this article we will look at how to install Minikube and Docker with VirtualBox on Windows 10 Home Machine. We use VirtualBox since Hyper V is not installed by default on the Windows 10 Home edition and secondly VirtualBox makes it easy to run multiple VMs especially various linux versions and therefore we might want to keep VirtualBox on the laptop. The first step in the installation is to disable Hyper V. If you have Windows 10 Home edition you can ignore that.

Disable Hyper V

Click on Search -> Type in ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ -> Uncheck Hyper V (and its children)

Install VirtualBox

VirtualBox allows you to run multiple operating systems on any machine. It can be installed on Windows, Mac, Linux or Solaris. So, for example, if you want to run linux on windows then VirtualBox is for you. VirtualBox can be installed from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads as shown in the image below. Download the installable specified in ‘Windows hosts’ and follow instructions. If you are installing Docker Toolbox for Windows (next step) then this step is optional since the Toolbox installs VirtualBox too.

Install Docker Toolbox for Windows

Docker for windows is the Communinity Edition that can be installed from the docker store, however, it needs Hyper V which we have just disabled (or is not available if you are using the home edition). We will therefore install Docker Toolbox for windows from https://docs.docker.com/toolbox/toolbox_install_windows/ as seen below. It might reinstall VirtualBox. Once you finish the installation click on the icon on the Desktop called ‘Docker Quickstart Terminal’. It will perform some steps to finish the installation.

Install minikube for Windows

Minikube can be installed using Chocolatey
choco install minikube
followed by installing the Kubernetes client
choco install kubernetes-cli
You can also download the exe directly. More info on this page – https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube

Once minikube is installed, to start it, type in ‘minikube.exe start –vm-driver=virtualbox”. This will download and install a single node Kubernetes cluster. It might take a while for the setup to end.

Minikube can be used to learn Kubernetes and play around with it. It can also be used for Kubernetes development on a laptop.