Installing Minikube using Homebrew

Apr 10, 2026 8 min read Backend

Requirements

  • Homebrew
  • Minikube
  • Docker
  • Visual Studio (or your favorite IDE)
  • iTerm or Terminal

Install Homebrew

Before using Minikube, we need to first install Homebrew.

You can check if brew is installed by running:

brew --version

If Homebrew is not installed, check out:

Homebrew

After installing, check again:

brew --version

You should see something like the following, including the version of Homebrew that you now have installed:

Homebrew 5.1.6
What’s Homebrew? Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. We’re using it here so Minikube can be installed and managed cleanly from the terminal instead of being set up manually.

Install Minikube

Now we’ll use Homebrew to install Minikube:

Minikube documentation

What is Minikube?

Minikube is an open-source tool that sets up a local, single-node Kubernetes cluster for you and gives you the ability to test applications locally.

Run the following command:

brew install minikube

Start Minikube

minikube start

Common Error

If you happen to get the following error:

Exiting due to DRV_UNSUPPORTED_OS: The driver 'virtualbox' is not supported on darwin/arm64

Make sure Docker is running. You can check by running the following command:

docker version

You can then run:

minikube start --driver=docker

What is this doing exactly?

This is telling Minikube to use Docker as a driver in order to run Kubernetes.

Successful Output

If you’ve done everything correctly up until now, you should see something like the following:

john@Johns-MacBook-Pro-3 posts % minikube start
😄  minikube v1.38.1 on Darwin 26.3.1 (arm64)
✨  Using the docker driver based on existing profile
👍  Starting "minikube" primary control-plane node in "minikube" cluster
🚜  Pulling base image v0.0.50 ...
🔄  Restarting existing docker container for "minikube" ...
🐳  Preparing Kubernetes v1.35.1 on Docker 29.2.1 ...
🔎  Verifying Kubernetes components...
    ▪ Using image gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner:v5
🌟  Enabled addons: storage-provisioner, default-storageclass
🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default

Stopping Minikube

If at any point you need to stop Minikube, you can run the following command:

minikube stop

Example output:

john@Johns-MacBook-Pro-3 posts % minikube stop
✋  Stopping node "minikube"  ...
🛑  Powering off "minikube" via SSH ...
🛑  1 node stopped.

What is this output telling us?

  • This output is telling us the version of Minikube that we have installed
  • It’s starting up a control-plane node in our Minikube cluster
  • This is essentially all Minikube is doing for us, providing us with a cluster that contains a node we can use for running and testing applications
  • Providing the base image that we are working with

Context to keep in mind

  • Minikube is our cluster
  • Our default namespace is default
© 2026 John Marin