Run Rocketship on Minikube

Use this guide when you want a fully isolated Rocketship stack on your laptop for development, demos, or CI automation. The repository ships with scripts/install-minikube.sh, which provisions Temporal plus the Rocketship engine and worker in a single namespace.

Prerequisites

• macOS or Linux host with at least 4 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM free
• Minikube v1.36+
• Kubectl pointed to your Minikube context
• Helm 3
• Docker (Minikube uses the local Docker daemon to build images)

1. Launch the Stack

From the repository root:

scripts/install-minikube.sh

The script performs the following steps:

1. Starts/ensures a Minikube profile (defaults to rocketship).
2. Switches the Docker context to Minikube and builds the engine and worker images as rocketship-engine-local:dev and rocketship-worker-local:dev.
3. Installs Temporal via the official Helm chart in the rocketship namespace using a minimal configuration (single replica services, Cassandra + Elasticsearch, no Prometheus/Grafana).
4. Registers the Temporal logical namespace rocketship using the Temporal CLI.
5. Installs the Rocketship Helm chart, pointing at the Temporal frontend service, and exposes ClusterIP services with named grpc/http ports.
6. Prints summary information and port-forward helper commands.

Typical output ends with:

Engine endpoint (gRPC): service rocketship-engine.rocketship:7700
Health endpoint: service rocketship-engine.rocketship:7701
Temporal host configured as: temporal-frontend.rocketship:7233

2. Customise the Install (Optional)

Environment variables let you adjust namespaces, release names, and Temporal workflow namespace without editing the script:

Variable	Default	Purpose
MINIKUBE_PROFILE	rocketship	Minikube profile name
ROCKETSHIP_NAMESPACE	rocketship	Kubernetes namespace for Rocketship services
TEMPORAL_NAMESPACE	rocketship	Namespace for Temporal Helm release
TEMPORAL_WORKFLOW_NAMESPACE	rocketship	Temporal logical namespace registered via CLI
TEMPORAL_RELEASE	temporal	Helm release name for Temporal
ROCKETSHIP_RELEASE	rocketship	Helm release name for Rocketship
ROCKETSHIP_CHART_PATH	charts/rocketship	Path to the chart (override when packaging)

Example: run everything inside a namespace called testing:

ROCKETSHIP_NAMESPACE=testing \
TEMPORAL_NAMESPACE=testing \
TEMPORAL_WORKFLOW_NAMESPACE=testing \
scripts/install-minikube.sh

3. Verify the Deployment

kubectl get pods -n rocketship
kubectl get svc -n rocketship

You should see Temporal pods (frontend, history, matching, worker, cassandra, elasticsearch) and two Rocketship deployments (rocketship-engine, rocketship-worker).

To exercise the stack locally:

kubectl port-forward -n rocketship svc/rocketship-engine 7700:7700
rocketship profile create minikube grpc://localhost:7700
rocketship profile use minikube
rocketship run -af examples/simple-http/rocketship.yaml

4. Manual Helm Flow (Optional)

If you prefer to perform the steps yourself:

1. Install Temporal:

   helm repo add temporal https://go.temporal.io/helm-charts
   helm repo update
   helm install temporal temporal/temporal \
     --version 0.66.0 \
     --namespace rocketship --create-namespace \
     --set server.replicaCount=1 \
     --set cassandra.config.cluster_size=1 \
     --set elasticsearch.replicas=1 \
     --set prometheus.enabled=false \
     --set grafana.enabled=false \
     --wait --timeout 15m
   

2. Register the Temporal namespace (default rocketship):

   kubectl exec -n rocketship deploy/temporal-admintools -- \
     temporal operator namespace create --namespace rocketship
   

3. Build local images and load them into Minikube:

   eval "$(minikube docker-env)"
   docker build -f .docker/Dockerfile.engine -t rocketship-engine-local:dev .
   docker build -f .docker/Dockerfile.worker -t rocketship-worker-local:dev .
   

4. Install Rocketship using overrides:

   helm install rocketship charts/rocketship \
     --namespace rocketship \
     --set temporal.host=temporal-frontend.rocketship:7233 \
     --set temporal.namespace=rocketship \
     --set engine.image.repository=rocketship-engine-local \
     --set engine.image.tag=dev \
     --set worker.image.repository=rocketship-worker-local \
     --set worker.image.tag=dev \
     --values charts/rocketship/values-minikube.yaml \
     --wait
   

5. Cleanup

helm uninstall rocketship -n rocketship
helm uninstall temporal -n rocketship
kubectl delete namespace rocketship
minikube delete -p rocketship

You now have a repeatable local environment for building new features, running integration tests, or debugging plugin behaviour before deploying to a managed cluster.