Chapter 2. Installing Red Hat Container Development Kit on Microsoft Windows

To run the CDK on a Microsoft Windows system, you will need:

Vagrant is used to run a Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machine with all necessary components for CDK. Virtualization is provided by installing VirtualBox.

Please note that Vagrant is strictly command-line oriented. All interaction with Vagrant is through the command line from a command prompt. Vagrant does not install any Start Menu entries or desktop shortcuts. You must launch PowerShell, cmd.exe or other shell to run Vagrant.

Command-line instructions use path names with a tilde, such as ~/cdk. This is a shorthand notation for a path relative to the current user’s home directory, C:\User\<username>\cdk. The %USERPROFILE% environment variable contains the Windows path to the user’s home directory and is the equivalent to ~/ in Linux.

# Cygwin Rsync under CMD.EXE Workaround
ENV["VAGRANT_DETECTED_OS"] = ENV["VAGRANT_DETECTED_OS"].to_s + " cygwin"

$ setx VAGRANT_DETECTED_OS cygwin

export VAGRANT_DETECTED_OS=cygwin

With the Vagrant box and Vagrantfiles in place, you are ready to bring up the selected Vagrant box. Your choices of Vagrantfiles are as follows:

NOTE: Instead of using one of the provided Vagrantfiles, you can copy one of the existing Vagrantfiles and modify it for your own purposes. For example, you might want to use a different IP address if it conflicts with an address on your local network.

Follow these instruction to start up a VM from the selected VM, from the proper Vagrantfile provided in the Red Hat Container Tools ZIP file.

In order to run the following steps, you need to have ssh.exe and rsync.exe in your path from installing Cygwin (or your choice of Linux-like utilities). You can temporarily add it for the current cmd.exe using the following command. If you go this route, you will need to do this every time you start a cmd.exe shell for use with Vagrant.

C:> PATH=%PATH%;C:\cygwin64\bin;

To add this location to your PATH permanently (for example, on a Windows 10 system), right click and select start system advanced system settings Environment variables. Then change the PATH variable as shown.

You also need to have edited the %USERPROFILE%\.vagrant.d\Vagrantfile file as discussed in the section Translating Windows Paths and rsync.

To use an existing Vagrantfile, go to the directory with the Vagrantfile you wish to use, and start the Red Hat Enterprise Linux CDK Vagrant box by running the vagrant up command from there. Two different Vagrantfiles are provided in the Red Hat Container Tools ZIP file for the following use cases.

At this point, if all is going well, you are asked for a username and password for Red Hat Subscription Management in order to register the system and enable downloading from Red Hat repositories. You have the choice of:

To register your system now, enter the username and password you use with the Red Hat Customer Portal.

==> default: Registering box with vagrant-registration…
    default: Would you like to register the system now (default: yes)? [y|n] y
    default: Subscriber username: <username>
    default: Subscriber password:

You can check whether your Vagrant box is running using the vagrant status command. Note that you must be in the same directory where your Vagrant file is located. For example, to check the status of the rhel-ose VM, type the following:

$ cd %USERPROFILE%\cdk\components\rhel\rhel-ose
$ vagrant status

If the machine state shows as running, you are ready to start using your CDK. Refer to the following: