Offline usage

minikube has built-in support for caching downloaded resources into $MINIKUBE_HOME/cache. Here are the important file locations:

• ~/.minikube/cache - Top-level folder
• ~/.minikube/cache/iso/<arch> - VM ISO image. Typically updated once per major minikube release.
• ~/.minikube/cache/kic/<arch> - Docker base image. Typically updated once per major minikube release.
• ~/.minikube/cache/images/<arch> - Images used by Kubernetes, only exists if preload doesn’t exist.
• ~/.minikube/cache/<os>/<arch>/<version> - Kubernetes binaries, such as kubeadm and kubelet
• ~/.minikube/cache/preloaded-tarball - Tarball of preloaded images to improve start time

Kubernetes image cache

NOTE: the none driver caches images directly into Docker rather than a separate disk cache.

minikube start caches all required Kubernetes images by default. This default may be changed by setting --cache-images=false. These images are not displayed by the minikube cache command.

Sharing the minikube cache

For offline use on other hosts, one can copy the contents of ~/.minikube/cache.

cache/linux/amd64/v1.26.1/kubectl
cache/kic/amd64/kicbase_v0.0.37@sha256_8bf7a0e8a062bc5e2b71d28b35bfa9cc862d9220e234e86176b3785f685d8b15.tar
cache/preloaded-tarball/preloaded-images-k8s-v18-v1.26.1-docker-overlay2-amd64.tar.lz4
cache/preloaded-tarball/preloaded-images-k8s-v18-v1.26.1-docker-overlay2-amd64.tar.lz4.checksum

If any of these files exist, minikube will use copy them into the VM directly rather than pulling them from the internet.