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Downloading or Building Kubernetes

You can either build a release from sources or download a pre-built release. If you do not plan on developing Kubernetes itself, we suggest a pre-built release.

If you just want to run Kubernetes locally for development, we recommend using Minikube. You can download Minikube here. Minikube sets up a local VM that runs a Kubernetes cluster securely, and makes it easy to work with that cluster.

• Prebuilt Binary Release
• Building from source
• Download Kubernetes and automatically set up a default cluster

Prebuilt Binary Release

The list of binary releases is available for download from the GitHub Kubernetes repo release page.

Download the latest release and unpack this tar file on Linux or OS X, cd to the created kubernetes/ directory, and then follow the getting started guide for your cloud.

On OS X you can also use the homebrew package manager: brew install kubernetes-cli

Building from source

Get the Kubernetes source. If you are simply building a release from source there is no need to set up a full golang environment as all building happens in a Docker container.

Building a release is simple.

git clone https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes.git
cd kubernetes
make release

For more details on the release process see the build directory

Download Kubernetes and automatically set up a default cluster

The bash script at https://get.k8s.io, which can be run with wget or curl, automatically downloads Kubernetes, and provisions a cluster based on your desired cloud provider.

# wget version
export KUBERNETES_PROVIDER=YOUR_PROVIDER; wget -q -O - https://get.k8s.io | bash

# curl version
export KUBERNETES_PROVIDER=YOUR_PROVIDER; curl -sS https://get.k8s.io | bash

Possible values for YOUR_PROVIDER include:

• gce - Google Compute Engine [default]
• gke - Google Container Engine
• aws - Amazon EC2
• azure - Microsoft Azure
• vagrant - Vagrant (on local virtual machines)
• vsphere - VMWare VSphere
• rackspace - Rackspace

For the complete, up-to-date list of providers supported by this script, see the /cluster folder in the main Kubernetes repo, where each folder represents a possible value for YOUR_PROVIDER. If you don’t see your desired provider, try looking at our getting started guides; there’s a good chance we have docs for them.