Troubleshooting

Enabling debug logs

Pass --alsologtostderr to minikube commands to see detailed log output output. To increase the log verbosity, you can use:

• -v=1: verbose messages
• -v=2: really verbose messages
• -v=8: more log messages than you can possibly handle.

Example:

minikube start --alsologtostderr --v=2 will start minikube and output all the important debug logs to stderr.

Post-mortem minikube debug logs

minikube stores post-mortem INFO logs in the temporary directory of your system. On macOS or Linux, it’s easy to get a list of recent INFO logs:

find $TMPDIR -mtime -1 -type f -name "*minikube*INFO*" -ls 2>/dev/null

For instance, this shows:

-rw-r--r-- 1 user grp 718 Aug 18 12:40 /var/folders/n1/qxvd9kc/T//minikube.mac.user.log.INFO.20200818-124017.63501

These are plain text log files: you may rename them to “.log” and then drag/drop them into a GitHub issue for further analysis by the minikube team. You can quickly inspect the final lines of any of these logs via:

tail -n 10 <filename>

for example, this shows:

I0818 12:40:17.027317   63501 out.go:197] Setting ErrFile to fd 2...
I0818 12:40:17.027321   63501 out.go:231] isatty.IsTerminal(2) = true
I0818 12:40:17.027423   63501 root.go:272] Updating PATH: /Users/tstromberg/.minikube/bin
I0818 12:40:17.027715   63501 mustload.go:64] Loading cluster: minikube

Gathering VM logs

To debug issues where Kubernetes failed to deploy, it is very useful to collect the Kubernetes pod and kernel logs:

minikube logs

Viewing Pod Status

To view the deployment state of all Kubernetes pods, use:

kubectl get po -A

Example output:

NAMESPACE     NAME                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system   coredns-5c98db65d4-299md    1/1     Running   0          11m
kube-system   coredns-5c98db65d4-qlpkd    1/1     Running   0          11m
kube-system   etcd-minikube               1/1     Running   0          10m
kube-system   gvisor                      1/1     Running   0          11m
...
kube-system   storage-provisioner         1/1     Running   0          11m

To view more detailed information about a pod, use:

kubectl describe pod <name> -n <namespace>

Debugging hung start-up

minikube will wait ~8 minutes before giving up on a Kubernetes deployment. If you want to see startup fails more immediately, consider using:

minikube logs --problems

This will attempt to surface known errors, such as invalid configuration flags. If nothing interesting shows up, try minikube logs.