UPDATE: I connected to the minikubevm and I see my host directory mounted but there is no files there. Also when I create a file there it will not in my host machine. Any li
EDIT: Looks like the solution is to either use a privilaged container, or to manually mount your home folder to allow the MiniKube VM to read from your hostPath -- https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker#virtualbox-guest-additions. (Credit to Eliel for figuring this out).
It is absolutely possible to configure a hostPath volume with minikube - but there are a lot of quirks and there isn't very good support for this particular issue.
Try removing ADD code/ /code from your Dockerfile. Docker's "ADD" instruction is copying the code from your host machine into your container's /code directory. This is why rebuilding the image successfully updates your code.
When Kubernetes tries to mount the container's /code directory to the host path, it finds that this directory is already full of the code that was baked into the image. If you take this out of the build step, Kubernetes should be able to successfully mount the host path at runtime.
Also be sure to check the permissions of the code/ directory on your host machine.
My only other thought is related to mounting in the root directory. I had issues when mounting Kubernetes hostPath volumes to/from directories in the root directory (I assume this was permissions related). So, something else to try would be a mountPath like /var/www/html.
Here's an example of a functional hostPath volume:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: example
spec:
volumes:
- name: example-volume
hostPath:
path: '/Users/example-user/code'
containers:
- name: example-container
image: example-image
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: '/var/www/html'
name: example-volume