For the development of this project I use Minikube as a replacement of Docker Desktop. This how I configure it.

m config set memory 8g
m config set cpus 8
m config set driver hyperkit
m config set container-runtime docker

m start -p docker --docker-opt=experimental=true --insecure-registry "192.168.205.0/25"
m profile docker
m addons enable registry

That created a Minikube instance with one cluster (docker) and one node in it. This instance runs a Docker daemon. The --insecure-registry flag allows that daemon to access image repositories without using TLS if they are in the specified network range. Then in this instance I installed the registry addon that sets up a local image repository. The image repository is accessible at the IP of the node and port 5000. You can get the IP of the node with this command:

m ip

You can check if the registry is working correctly by using this command:

curl http://x.x.x.x:5000/v2/_catalog

With this setup if you set the corresponding environment variables by using this command:

eval $(m -p docker docker-env)

the docker client will be able to communicate with the Docker daemon running in Minikube, through the remote api. That will allow gradle plugins to use that daemon to build and publish images. For the images to be published to this local registry they need to start with the IP of the node in the docker cluster that is running the registry server. So for example if your image name is accounts:1.0.0 then you need to prefix it with x.x.x.x:5000/accounts:1.0.0 where x.x.x.x is the IP of your local registry server.

Now, if besides using Minikube as a replacement of Docker Desktop you want to use it to work with Kubernetes, you can set up a multi node cluster in addition to the docker cluster that we are using for the local registry and for the docker client to interact with a Docker daemon.

m start -p multi --nodes 3 --insecure-registry "192.168.205.0/25"

That will create an additional cluster with 3 nodes with the name multi. We are using again the flag -insecure-registry, that will allow the Docker daemon running in this instance to access images repositories without using TLS. The nodes in this cluster can access the node running in the docker cluster, and for that reason can use its local registry to download that images from there, if they were prefixed with x.x.x.x:5000 in you Kubernetes manifest like this:

│ Containers:                                                                                                                                           │
│   currency:                                                                                                                                           │                                                      │
│     Image: 192.168.205.43:5000/accounts:1.0.0 

Finally, to deploy the services to Minikube you can use the Helm chat of this project. Check its documentation in the corresponding folder of this repository.