Minikube Storage: PersistentVolumes, StorageClasses, and Data Persistence#

Minikube ships with a built-in storage provisioner that handles PersistentVolumeClaims automatically. Understanding how it works – and where it differs from production storage – is essential for testing stateful workloads locally.

Default Storage: The hostPath Provisioner#

When you start minikube, it registers a default StorageClass called standard backed by the k8s.io/minikube-hostpath provisioner. This provisioner creates PersistentVolumes as directories on the minikube node’s filesystem.

Multi-Cluster Emulation with Minikube Profiles#

Production infrastructure rarely runs on a single cluster. You have staging, production, maybe a dedicated cluster for CI or data workloads. Minikube profiles let you run multiple independent Kubernetes clusters on one machine, each with its own version, resources, and addons. This is how you test multi-cluster workflows without cloud accounts.

What Profiles Are#

A minikube profile is a fully independent cluster. Each profile has its own:

Using Minikube for CI, Integration Testing, and Local Development Workflows#

Minikube gives you a real Kubernetes cluster wherever you need one – on a developer laptop, in a GitHub Actions runner, or in any CI environment that has Docker. The patterns differ between local development and CI, but the underlying approach is the same: stand up a cluster, deploy your workload and its dependencies, test against it, tear it down.