Local Cluster

Skaffold can be easily configured to deploy against a cluster hosted locally, most commonly with minikube or docker-for-desktop. The advantage of this setup is that no images need to be pushed, since the local cluster uses images straight from your local docker daemon.

For non-standard local setups, such as a custom minikube profile or kind, some extra configuration is necessary. The essential steps are:

1. Ensure that Skaffold builds the images with the docker daemon, which also runs the containers.

2. Tell Skaffold to skip pushing images either by configuring

   build:
     local:
       push: false

or by marking a Kubernetes context as local (see the following example).

For example, when running minikube with a custom profile (e.g. minikube start -p my-profile):

1. Set up the docker environment for Skaffold with source <(minikube docker-env -p my-profile). This should set some environment variables for docker (check with env | grep DOCKER). It is important to do this in the same shell where Skaffold is executed.

2. Tell Skaffold that the Kubernetes context my-profile refers to a local cluster with

   skaffold config set --kube-context my-profile local-cluster true