How to setup a local persistent volume in kubernetes

I’m running a single node kubernetes cluster and one of the first things I needed was persistent storage. To create a volume that you can mount into your containers in a pod you have to create a PersistentVolume (PV) and then request it with a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC).

Create a PersistentVolume (PV) object, pointing at a path on your host. Note the spec.capacity.storage, spec.hostPath.path and change these accordingly.

 1apiVersion: v1
 2kind: PersistentVolume
 3metadata:
 4  name: persistent-test-volume
 5  labels:
 6    name: persistent-test-volume
 7spec:
 8  volumeMode: Filesystem
 9  storageClassName: standard
10  accessModes:
11    - ReadWriteOnce # type of access
12  capacity:
13    storage: 100Gi # Size of the volume
14  hostPath:
15    path: "/storage/volumes/test-volume"

Next you must create a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) to request access to the resources of the PersistentVolume (PV).

 1apiVersion: v1
 2kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
 3metadata:
 4  name: persistent-test-volume-claim
 5spec:
 6  volumeMode: Filesystem
 7  storageClassName: standard
 8  accessModes:
 9    - ReadWriteOnce
10  resources:
11    requests:
12      storage: 100Gi
13  selector:
14    matchLabels:
15      name: persistent-test-volume

Now that we’ve set these two resources up, we can create a pod with a container that references the PVC we made above in the spec.volumes

 1apiVersion: v1
 2kind: Pod
 3metadata:
 4  name: pv-tester
 5  namespace: default
 6spec:
 7  restartPolicy: Never
 8  containers:
 9    - name: pv-tester
10      image: busybox
11      command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "echo 'Hello volume' > /test_vol/hello.txt"]
12      volumeMounts:
13        - name: vol
14          mountPath: /test_vol
15  volumes:
16    - name: vol
17      persistentVolumeClaim:
18        claimName: persistent-test-volume-claim

You now should be able to see the hello.txt file at the path /storage/volumes/ on the host machine.