Mount local directory into pod in minikube

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

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

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.

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

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/