Minikube on Windows - teething troubles

The .minikube folder location

So I was recently getting Minikube on my work laptop. As it happens, this did not go painlessly. My C drive has a measly 100G (free 8G) so almost all tools I install, if their dot file folder is going to hold anything significant like virtualbox images, I usually symlink it off to my D drive which is a lot roomier.

DON'T DO THAT WITH MINIKUBE YET.... it does not work :(. I tried symlinking the .minikube folder when that didn't work, then the .minikube/machines folder - neither worked. If you're really desperate, you could use Virtualbox media manager to move the disk to some other drive. Of course, this isn't really a solution since you need to have enough space in C in the first place.

There's a ticket to have a MINIKUBE_HOME which will let you move the config folder around - so go subscribe to it if you need this. The second PITA is that the minikube.exe as well as the kubectl all have to be on C drive as well - but symlinks work for that.

SSH client

I also ran into trouble with ssh - minikube vm provisioning was using my external SSH client that it found on PATH and was calling that without quoting properly which resulted in the provisioning failing. Turning on verbose logging with --v 9 showed what was happening and the easiest way out was to make sure there's no ssh.exe on path - this forces minikube to use it's internal ssh client and provisioning proceeded.

Once you have Minikube up though, it's quite nice to work with.

Posix compatible PTY in Windows

Get a real Posix compatible PTY in Windows

If you do any work on hte console in WIndows and are not on Windows 10, then you should probably use Conemu.

If you're a linux shell fan and are using Msys2 or Cygwin on windows, then an additional tweak is to enable the experimental Posix compatible PTY support in ConEmu.

I've been a long term ConEmu user and did not know about this till yesterday. Enable it and you get full xterm-256color TERM.

So cat $ConEmuBaseDir/Addons/AnsiColors256.ans now produces

Here's how the tasks are set up in ConEmu - this one's for MSYS2

set MSYSTEM=MINGW64 & set MSYS2_PATH_TYPE=inherit & set HOME=c:\users\raghuramanr & d:\msys64\usr\bin\conemu-msys2-64.exe /usr/bin/zsh -l -i

See here for directions

Hey look! A flying pig!

:)

MS has added git support to Codeplex - who'd have thought that such a day would ever dawn.

Kudos to the good souls at MS who made this happen - One can only imagine the kind of conversations that would've taken place to get the necessary approvals for this :).

Still Git has great mindshare but native windows support is pretty bad. Hopefully this might even help making a good gui for git on windows. After creating an abomination like TFS, MS should realize the benefit of just going with openly available tools rather than create.

Maybe not - that's more like seeing a squadron of pigs flying!