Host access

How to access host resources from a pod

Prerequisites

The service running on your host must either be bound to all IP’s (0.0.0.0) and interfaces, or to the IP and interface your VM is bridged against. If the service is bound only to localhost (127.0.0.1), this will not work.

host.minikube.internal

To make it easier to access your host, minikube v1.10 adds a hostname entry host.minikube.internal to /etc/hosts. The IP which host.minikube.internal resolves to is different across drivers, and may be different across clusters.

Validating connectivity

You can use minikube ssh to confirm connectivity:

  1.                          _             _
  2.             _         _ ( )           ( )
  3.   ___ ___  (_)  ___  (_)| |/')  _   _ | |_      __  
  4. /' _ ` _ `\| |/' _ `\| || , <  ( ) ( )| '_`\  /'__`\
  5. | ( ) ( ) || || ( ) || || |\`\ | (_) || |_) )(  ___/
  6. (_) (_) (_)(_)(_) (_)(_)(_) (_)`\___/'(_,__/'`\____)
  8. $ ping host.minikube.internal
  9. PING host.minikube.internal (192.168.64.1): 56 data bytes
  10. 64 bytes from 192.168.64.1: seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.225 ms

To test connectivity to a specific TCP service listening on your host, use nc -vz host.minikube.internal <port>:

  1. $ nc -vz host.minikube.internal 8000
  2. Connection to host.minikube.internal 8000 port [tcp/*] succeeded!

Here are how to interpret the different messages:

  • Connection succeeded: You are connected!
  • Connection refused: the service is not listening on the port, at least not across all interfaces

Note

When using an older version of minikube, you may have to manually install tools like ping and netcat within the minikube image:

  1. sudo apt install iputils-ping netcat-openbsd

Last modified May 11, 2021: Add useful tools in the Kicbase Docker image (075ca2049)