Minikube is an awesome tool to practice Kubernetes locally, on your laptop. However, there’re some limitations to run it on Mac which uses M1 chip, since some of the pre-requisite was not able to be installed from Homebrew and some drivers are not supported yet.

Here’s what I followed to start the Minikube instance.

First, install Docker, see more details in https://docs.docker.com/desktop/install/mac-install/. Please skip if you already installed it, but make sure you turn it on before proceeding the next steps.

After that, we install the Minikube for M1 chip. With the curl below, it will download and install it.

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-darwin-arm64
sudo install minikube-darwin-arm64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Once the download is done, we are ready. Please run the command below, which specifies the driver as Docker and enables the log to see the detailed log output.

minikube start --driver=docker --alsologtostderr

That’s it! Now you can see the minikube instance is running on your M1 Macbook.

Tips:

• VirtualBox is not supported, even you download the developer version for MacOS/ARM M1/M2, you would see an error like ‘Exiting due to DRV_UNSUPPORTED_OS: The driver ‘virtualbox’ is not supported on darwin/arm64′.