Building the minikube ISO

Overview

The minikube ISO is booted by each hypervisor to provide a stable minimal Linux environment to start Kubernetes from. It is based on coreboot, uses systemd, and includes all necessary container runtimes and hypervisor guest drivers.

Prerequisites

  • Machine with x86_64 CPU
  • Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)
  • docker
  • A recent GNU Make distribution (>=4.0)
  • A recent Go distribution (>=1.22.0)
  • If you are on Windows or Mac, you’ll need Docker to be installed.
  • 4GB of RAM

Downloading the source

git clone https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube.git
cd minikube

Building

Building in Docker

To build for x86:

$ make buildroot-image
$ make minikube-iso-x86_64

To build for ARM:

$ make buildroot-image
$ make minikube-iso-aarch64

The build will occur inside a docker container. The bootable ISO image will be available in out/minikube-<arch>.iso.

Building without docker

Install required tools:

sudo apt-get install \
    automake \
    bc \
    build-essential \
    cpio \
    gcc-multilib \
    genisoimage \
    git \
    gnupg2 \
    libtool \
    locales \
    p7zip-full \
    python2 \
    unzip \
    wget \

Install Go using these instructions: https://go.dev/doc/install

To build without docker run:

IN_DOCKER=1 make minikube-iso-<arch>

[!IMPORTANT] Some external projects will try to use docker even when building without docker. You must install docker on the build host.

Using a local ISO image

$ ./out/minikube start --iso-url=file://$(pwd)/out/minikube-<arch>.iso

Modifying buildroot components

To change which Linux userland components are included by the guest VM, use this to modify the buildroot configuration:

cd out/buildroot
make menuconfig
make

To save these configuration changes, execute:

make savedefconfig

The changes will be reflected in the minikube-iso/configs/minikube_defconfig file.

Adding kernel modules

To make kernel configuration changes and save them, execute:

$ make linux-menuconfig

This will open the kernel configuration menu, and then save your changes to our iso directory after they’ve been selected.

Adding third-party packages

To add your own package to the minikube ISO, create a package directory under iso/minikube-iso/package. This directory will require at least 3 files:

<package name>.mk - A Makefile describing how to download the source code and build the program
<package name>.hash - Checksums to verify the downloaded source code
Config.in - buildroot configuration

For a relatively simple example to start with, you may want to reference the podman package.

Continuous Integration Builds

We publish CI builds of minikube, built at every Pull Request. Builds are available at (substitute in the relevant PR number):


Last modified May 28, 2025: docs: Fix instructions for building iso (#20830) (c306a0fbd)