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 - VM ISO image. Typically updated once per major minikube release.
• ~/.minikube/cache/images - Docker images used by Kubernetes.
• ~/.minikube/cache/<version> - Kubernetes binaries, such as kubeadm and kubelet

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. As of the v1.0 release, this directory contains 685MB of data:

cache/iso/minikube-v1.0.0.iso
cache/images/gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner_v1.8.1
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/k8s-dns-sidecar-amd64_1.14.13
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/k8s-dns-dnsmasq-nanny-amd64_1.14.13
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/kubernetes-dashboard-amd64_v1.10.1
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/kube-scheduler_v1.14.0
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/coredns_1.3.1
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/kube-controller-manager_v1.14.0
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/kube-apiserver_v1.14.0
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/pause_3.1
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/etcd_3.3.10
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/kube-addon-manager_v9.0
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/k8s-dns-kube-dns-amd64_1.14.13
cache/images/k8s.gcr.io/kube-proxy_v1.14.0
cache/v1.14.0/kubeadm
cache/v1.14.0/kubelet

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