Instructions for running Kubeflow Pipelines on Minikube, locally on macOS

minikubeflow-pipelines.md

Run Kubeflow Pipelines on Minikube on macOS

Supplemental to Kubeflow Pipelines' docs about using Minikube.

Set up minikube

See Minikube docs.

Install minikube

brew install minikube

Start minikube

minikube start --cpus 4 --memory 8096 --disk-size=40g --vm-driver=hyperkit

I tried running with lower values (IIRC, the defaults: 2 CPUs, 4G RAM, 20G disk) and lots of things failed (cf. minikube#4749).

Sanity check:

minikube status

host: Running
kubelet: Running
apiserver: Running
kubectl: Correctly Configured: pointing to minikube-vm at 192.168.64.3

Open dashboard in browser

minikube dashboard

Set up Kubeflow Pipelines

A key step not mentioned in the docs seems to be this post-installation section in the AWS docs.

Between kfctl generate all -V and kfctl apply all -V (cf. Deploying Kubeflow docs), while in your ${KFAPP} directory, run:

cat <<EOF >profile.yaml
apiVersion: kubeflow.org/v1alpha1
kind: Profile
metadata:
  name: sample-user
spec:
  owner:
    kind: User
    name: sample-user
EOF
kubectl apply -f profile.yaml

otherwise your kfctl apply all -V will hang, printing:

WARN[0016] Could not find namespace kubeflow-anonymous, wait and retry: namespaces "kubeflow-anonymous" not found  filename="kustomize/kustomize.go:353"
WARN[0020] Could not find namespace kubeflow-anonymous, wait and retry: namespaces "kubeflow-anonymous" not found  filename="kustomize/kustomize.go:353"
WARN[0026] Could not find namespace kubeflow-anonymous, wait and retry: namespaces "kubeflow-anonymous" not found  filename="kustomize/kustomize.go:353"
…

If you run into this issue, simply applying kubectl apply -f profile.yaml (cf. above) and re-running kfctl apply all -V will see the latter fail (applying some istio components is apparently not idempotent); you'll see a failure like:

INFO[0001] creating Service/istio-ingressgateway         filename="kustomize/kustomize.go:447"
Error: couldn't apply KfApp:  (kubeflow.error): Code 500 with message: kfApp Apply failed for kustomize:  (kubeflow.error): Code 500 with message: couldn't create resources from istio-install Error: Service "istio-ingressgateway" is invalid: spec.ports[1].nodePort: Invalid value: 31380: provided port is already allocated

The easiest fix seems to be to explicitly delete+recreate the istio components. The following seems to be sufficient:

kubectl -n istio-system delete deployments,jobs,pods,svc --all

Re-running kfctl apply all -V should succeed after that, and the final kubeflow+minikube instruction will set up your Kubeflow Pipelines web UI at http://localhost:8080/_/pipeline/:

kubectl port-forward -n istio-system svc/istio-ingressgateway 8080:80

🎉