Solution:

As I mentioned in my comment you may just need to run:

docker system prune

then:

minikube delete

and finally:

minikube start --driver=docker

This should help.

Explanation:

Although as I already mentioned in my comment, it s difficult to say what was the issue in your specific case, such situation may happen as a consequence of previous unseccessful attempt to run your Minikube instance.

It happens sometimes also when different driver is used and it is run as a VM and basically deleting such VM may help. Usually running minikube delete && minikube start is enough.

In this case, when --driver=docker is used, your Minikube instance is configured as a container in your docker runtime but apart from container itself other things like networking or storage are configured.

docker system prune command removes all unused containers, networks, images (both dangling and unreferenced), and optionally, volumes. So what we can say for sure it was one of the above.

Judging by the exact error message:

❌  Exiting due to GUEST_PROVISION: Failed to start host: creating host: create: creating: prepare kic ssh: copying pub key: docker copy /tmp/tmpf-memory-asset544814591 into minikube:/home/docker/.ssh/authorized_keys, output: lstat /tmp/tmpf-memory-asset544814591: no such file or directory
: exit status 1

I guess it could be simply clearing some cached data that helped in your case and removing broken references to non-existing files. The above message explains quite clearly what couldn t be done, namely docker couldn t copy a public ssh key to the destination minikube:/home/docker/.ssh/authorized_keys as the source file /tmp/tmpf-memory-asset544814591, it attempted to copy it from, simply didn t exist. So it s actually very simple to say what happend but to be able to tell why it happened might require diving a bit deeper in both Docker and Minikube internals and analyze step by step how Minikube instance is provisioned when using --driver=docker.

It s a good point that you may try to analyze your docker logs but I seriously doubt that you will find there the exact reason why non-existing temporary file /tmp/tmpf-memory-asset544814591 was referenced or why it didn t exsist.

minikube start --force --driver=docker fixed it for me

The issue is that the docker driver should not be used with root privileges. And by default, the docker daemon always runs as the root user. To run the docker daemon not as root user, create a Unix group called docker and add users to it. When the Docker daemon starts, it creates a Unix socket accessible by members of the docker group.

Run the following commands to fix this issue

1. Create the docker group if not exist

sudo groupadd docker

2. Add user to the docker group

sudo usermod -aG docker [user]

3. To activate changes to the group

newgrp docker

4. start minikube cluster

minikube start

This worked for me minikube start --driver=docker --container-runtime=containerd

if you use Linux Desktop OS with docker and minikube already installed, just run

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

and restart your computer. It worked for me.

I was running into the same issue when I attempted to install Minikube on an Ubuntu 20.04 system.

The "docker system prune" didn t help in my case, but I figured out the cause for my issue was that /var was mounted with the nosuid option and I had to remove that and remount /var. The minikube cluster initialization then worked.

I might be too ignorant but I didn t find that info stated as a requirement.

Restarting my mac helped me.

I was getting below error earlier:

❌  Exiting due to DRV DOCKER NOT RUNNING: Found docker, but the docker service isn t running. Try restarting the docker service.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

sudo systemctl enable docker

systemctl status docker

sudo systemctl start/stop docker

sudo groupadd docker

sudo usermod -aG docker user_name --- to add the user to docker group.

newgrp docker -- to activate the grp

minikube start or minikube start --driver=docker ---to start minikube

On my Raspberry Pi this problem was resolved with:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER && newgrp docker

Try the following:

minikube delete

Then try to delete all docker images with name like k8s... and minikube:

docker rmi <container id> <container id2> <container id3>

Finally:

minikube start

On my end just a docker system prune did the job (Ubuntu). I had a few configurations I did not want to lose on my minikube profile and it recreated the container accordinlgy and booted fine. So before the minikube profile deletion it is something to try first.

It s worth checking to see if it s running in Docker desktop on a Mac. If it is then run the kubectl command. If that returns the commands screen then you re good to go.

Try the following first:

sudo chmod 666 /var/run/docker.sock

Then finally:

minikube start --driver=docker