Chapter 7. Interacting with OpenShift

Minishift creates a virtual machine (VM) and provisions a local, single-node OpenShift cluster in this VM. The following sections describe how Minishift can assist you in interacting with and configuring your local OpenShift instance.

For details about managing the Minishift VM, see the Managing Minishift section.

The minishift start command creates an OpenShift instance using the cluster up approach.

For this purpose it copies the oc binary onto your host. You will find it under ~/.minishift/cache/oc/3.5/oc, provided you use Minishift’s default version of OpenShift.

You can add this binary to your PATH using minishift oc-env which displays the command you need to type into your shell. The output of oc-env will differ depending on OS and shell type.

~]$ minishift oc-env
export PATH="/Users/john/.minishift/cache/oc/v1.5.0:$PATH"
# Run this command to configure your shell:
# eval $(minishift oc-env)

As part of the minishift start command there is also a minishift oc context created. This context contains the configuration to communicate with your OpenShift cluster.

Minishift activates this context automatically, but if you need to switch back to it after for example, logging into another OpenShift instance, you can run:

~]$ oc config use-context minishift

For an introduction to oc usage, refer to the Get Started with the CLI topic in the OpenShift documentation.

By default, cluster up uses AllowAllPasswordIdentityProvider to authenticate against the local cluster. This means any non-empty user name and password can be used to login to the local cluster. The recommended user name and password combination is developer/developer, because it already has a default project myproject and also can impersonate the administrator user. This allows to run administrator commands using the --as system:admin parameter.

To login as administrator, use the system account:

~]$ oc login -u system:admin

In this case, client certificates are used. The certificates are stored in ~/.kube/config. The cluster up command installs the appropriate certificates as a part of the bootstrap.

To view the currently available login contexts, run:

~]$ oc config view

To access the OpenShift console, you can run this command in a shell after starting Minishift to get the URL of the Web console:

~]$ minishift console --url

Alternatively, after starting Minishift, you can use the following command to directly open the console in a browser:

~]$ minishift console

To access a service exposed with a node port, run this command in a shell after starting Minishift to get the address:

~]$ minishift openshift service [-n <NAMESPACE>] [--url] <NAME>

To access OpenShift logs, run the logs command after starting Minishift:

~]$ minishift logs

While OpenShift is running, you can view and change the master or the node configuration of your cluster.

To view the current OpenShift master configuration master-config.yaml, run the following command:

~]$ minishift openshift config view

To show the node configuration instead of the master configuration, specify the target flag.

In this example, you configure cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) by updating the OpenShift master configuration to allow additional IP addresses to request resources.

By default, OpenShift only allows cross-origin resource requests from the IP address of the cluster or from localhost. This setting is stored in the corsAllowedOrigins property of the master configuration file master-config.yaml.

To change the property value and allow cross-origin requests from all domains, run the following command:

~]$  minishift openshift config set --patch '{"corsAllowedOrigins": ["."]}'*

$  .\minishift.exe --% openshift config set --patch "{\"routingConfig\": {\"subdomain\": \"192.168.99.101.nip.io\"}}"

$ .\minishift.exe openshift config set --patch "{\"routingConfig\": {\"subdomain\": \"192.168.99.101.nip.io\"}}"

~]$ minishift openshift config set --patch '{"routingConfig": {"subdomain": "<IP-ADDRESS>.xip.io"}}'