Mac – how to use kubernetes with Lima-VM

Lima is Linux virtual machines (on macOS, in most cases). Lima launches Linux virtual machines with automatic file sharing and port forwarding (similar to WSL2), and containerd. Lima can be considered as a some sort of unofficial “containerd for Mac”. Lima is expected to be used on macOS hosts, but can be used on Linux hosts as well.

Steps to install Lima-VM (alternative to docker) and use it with kubernetes on Mac:

1. Instal lima
   brew install lima
2. start lima
   limactl start
3. Check uname
   lima uname -a
   

   Linux lima-default 5.19.0-26-generic #27-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed Nov 23 20:49:05 UTC 2022 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

4. Open shell to VM
   lima
5. Create a container using lima directly
   lima nerdctl run -p 8001:80 --name nginx -d nginx
6. List all containers
   lima nerdctl ps -a
   

   CONTAINER ID    IMAGE                                  COMMAND                   CREATED               STATUS     PORTS                     NAMES
   3c57f17c0986    docker.io/library/nginx:latest         "/docker-entrypoint.…"    About a minute ago    Up         0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp      nginx

7. Get a shell to above container
   lima nerdctl exec -it nginx /bin/bash
8. Stop, rm and start container again
   lima nerdctl stop nginx
lima nerdctl rm nginx
lima nerdctl start nginx
9. Install minikube and start it using drive qemu
   brew install minikube
minikube start --driver=qemu
minikube dashboard
10. Create a simple pod (nginx) using kubectl
    kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/pods/simple-pod.yaml
11. Get a shell on nginx pod
    kubectl exec -it nginx -- /bin/bash
    (Please note that this container is attached to the pod and different from container created above using lima nerdctl)
12. To list instances, stop and delete
    limactl list
limactl stop
limactl delete default