Helm and minikube: service ip missing

I am trying examples from the book Learning Helm. I seem to be missing something. I cannot install chart from helm repo:

xxxxx:~ $ helm install my-nginx bitnami/nginx
NAME: my-nginx
LAST DEPLOYED: Sat Jan  9 20:26:22 2021
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None
NOTES:
** Please be patient while the chart is being deployed **

NGINX can be accessed through the following DNS name from within your cluster:

    my-nginx.default.svc.cluster.local (port 80)

To access NGINX from outside the cluster, follow the steps below:

1. Get the NGINX URL by running these commands:

  NOTE: It may take a few minutes for the LoadBalancer IP to be available.
        Watch the status with: 'kubectl get svc --namespace default -w my-nginx'

    export SERVICE_PORT=$(kubectl get --namespace default -o jsonpath="{.spec.ports[0].port}" services my-nginx)
    export SERVICE_IP=$(kubectl get svc --namespace default my-nginx -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
    echo "http://${SERVICE_IP}:${SERVICE_PORT}"

xxxxx:~ $ export SERVICE_PORT=$(kubectl get --namespace default -o jsonpath="{.spec.ports[0].port}" services my-nginx)
xxxxx:~ $ export SERVICE_IP=$(kubectl get svc --namespace default my-nginx -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
xxxxx:~ $ echo "http://${SERVICE_IP}:${SERVICE_PORT}"
http://:80

$ kubectl get svc --namespace default -w my-nginx
NAME       TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)        AGE
my-nginx   LoadBalancer   10.104.16.177   <pending>     80:30977/TCP  17h

Some more details.

Solution

The line in the following to extract the service IP is to get the external IP in the service object.

export SERVICE_IP=$(kubectl get svc --namespace default my-nginx -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')

In LoadBalancer service type, Kubernetes tries to get an external IP address and release the target service with that IP address. In self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, the external IP cannot be provisioned automatically. In most of the hosted clusters in public cloud, like GKE, EKS etc, they have had the integration with the external IP address provision. So, you can get it automatically once you set up the service as LoadBalancer.

It is still possible to do this automation with 3rd party operators/applications, like MetalLB. But in most of the self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, it is suggested to access the service with NodePort service type.

Please rerun the helm command with the follow argument. It will change the service type from LoadBalancer to NodePort. Following the instruction from the stdout may allow you to access your service.

> helm install my-nginx bitnami/nginx --set service.type=NodePort

On the other hand, you can follow the minikube official doc here to set up the support in LoadBalancer service.