Minikube installation instructions added

[idvoretskyi]

Tested with Minikube+KVM (4 CPU; 4GB RAM).

Signed-off-by: Ihor Dvoretskyi [email protected]

[ahmetb]

we strive to keep the "number of options" low to run this demo app.

so we should probably kill the "docker for desktop" option in favor of minikube. what do you think?

[idvoretskyi]

so we should probably kill the "docker for desktop" option in favor of minikube. what do you think?

Fine with that, but we'll need someone to test this with Minikube on Mac/Windows (I don't have them).

[ahmetb]

I'm trying this, so far it crashed in the middle of skaffold run with no error once (4 CPUs, 3GiB RAM):

...
Step 3/16 : ENV PROJECT github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo/src/productcatalogservice
 ---> Running in f1c075448b0f
 ---> 3055a5df5d85
Step 4/16 : WORKDIR /go/src/$PROJECT
 ---> Running in 48564497716d
 ---> 45c1487fb1f3
Step 5/16 : COPY Gopkg.* ./
 ---> a7fc148b57b6
Step 6/16 : RUN dep ensure --vendor-only -v
 ---> Running in 53d8a267940d
(1/21) Wrote github.com/googleapis/[email protected]

[ahmetb]

Second build succeeded and it seems to be working OK (on 4cpus/3096MB).

Most notably, the last step of the local instructions needs to be changed from

Visit http://localhost:80

to

Run minikube service frontend-external --url and visit the URL

Sadly the URL looks much less intiutive, like http://192.168.64.2:31594 (not only it's not on port :80 as the Service spec defines, but also not exposed directly on localhost). Does Minikube offer anything to make this better?

But other than that, I can't seem to find any problems.

[ahmetb]

Found another somewhat interesting problem.

Many users of this demo app are Googlers, and they all use the same browser with a corp proxy extension preinstalled.

When they go to the http://192.168.64.2 like URL above, the proxy will treat the URL not local to the machine, but local to Google’s corporate network. (Docker for Mac doesn't have this problem as it uses localhost which never routes outside your machine.)

As a result, they will go to an error page that reads Failed to connect to the backend. because that IP is routed to our corp proxy. This will confuse Googlers quite a bit and we (particularly me) may get a lot of messages from new Googlers adopting this demo app for troubleshooting. 🤷‍♂️ I really wish there was a way to use localhost with Minikube.

[idvoretskyi]

I really wish there was a way to use localhost with Minikube.

@tstromberg do you have any suggestions on this?

[sdake]

drive-by review as I was filing an issue request. Hope you don't mind :)

Cheers
-steve

[idvoretskyi]

Thank you @sdake, I'll address your comments.

[daniel-sanche]

LGTM