The document discusses setting up Project Calico networking on Minikube locally. It describes installing kubectl and Minikube on Ubuntu, then configuring Calico in policy-only mode by starting Minikube with specific flags and installing Calico from a YAML file. Finally, it checks that all pods are running successfully.

1. Anirban Sen Chowdhary

2. Before we start, we should know what Project Calico is.
As per Project Calico documentation, Calico is a Tigera
open source project and is primarily maintained by the
Tigera team, enabling cloud native application
connectivity and policy. Calico integrates with major
orchestration systems like Kubernetes, Apache Mesos,
Docker, OpenStack and more to provide a seamless
experience for developers and operators.

3. The main feature of Calico are:
 Scalable, distributed control plane
 Policy-driven network security
 No overlay required
 Integrated with all major cloud platforms
 Widely deployed, and proven at scale

4. In this blog, we will see how to start with Project Calico
(https://www.projectcalico.org/) with Minikube
(https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube).
To start with, we need Minikube
(https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube), which is
a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally.

6. So we will first get kubectl and minikube in our Ubuntu OS to start
with.
We will use the following commands to install kubectl in our Ubuntu
OS.
echo "Installing kubectl..........................."
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-
release/release/v1.4.4/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
chmod +x kubectl
sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl
The above command will get you kubectl installed into the
/usr/local/bin location with required access to the file.

7. Simmilarly, the following command will install minikube
in Ubuntu OS under /usr/local/bin location with
requered access to the file.
echo "Installing minikube.........................."
curl -Lo minikube
https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/v
0.15.0/minikube-linux-amd64 && chmod +x minikube
&& sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/

9. We can now configure Calico in Policy-only mode. In this mode Calico
is not setting up the networking but uses the 'host-local' plugin for
IPAM so depends on K8s for IPAM. The minikube start command
that can configure is:
minikube start --memory 2096 --network-plugin=cni --host-only-
cidr=192.168.0.0/16
--extra-config=kubelet.PodCIDR=192.168.0.0/16
--extra-config=proxy.ClusterCIDR=192.168.0.0/16
--extra-config=controller-manager.ClusterCIDR=192.168.0.0/16
--extra-config=controller-
manager.CIDRAllocatorType=RangeAllocator
--extra-config=controller-manager.AllocateNodeCIDRs=true

10. We can see minikube getting started:

11. Next, we will see it has started successfully:

12. Now, we need to get calico.yaml from
https://docs.projectcalico.org/v2.6/getting-
started/kubernetes/installation/hosted/kubeadm/1.6
/calico.yaml location to install Calico from calico.yaml
locally.

13. After getting calico.yaml locally, we can use following commands to install
Calico and a single node etcd with kubectl:
kubectl apply -f calico.yaml
We can see now as below:

14. To confirm that all of the pods are running with the following
command:
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

15. We need to wait until each pod has the STATUS of
Running.

16. If we go back to the location /usr/local/bin/ where all our files are stored and
installed, we can see as below: