Chapter 12. CodeReady Workspaces Administration Guide

You must have at least 5 GB of RAM to run CodeReady Workspaces. The Keycloak authorization server and PostgreSQL database require the extra RAM. CodeReady Workspaces uses RAM in this distribution:

$ oc set env dc/che CHE_WORKSPACE_DEFAULT__MEMORY__LIMIT__MB=2048 \
                         CHE_WORKSPACE_DEFAULT__MEMORY__REQUEST__MB=1024

Workspace pods are created in the account of the user who deploys CodeReady Workspaces. The user needs enough quota for RAM, CPU, and storage to create the pods.

Workspace objects are created differently depending on the configuration. CodeReady Workspaces currently supports two different configurations:

CodeReady Workspaces server, Keycloak and PostgreSQL pods, and workspace pods use Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs), which are bound to the physical Persistent Volumes (PVs) with ReadWriteOnce access mode. When the deployment YAML files run, they define the CodeReady Workspaces PVCs. You can configure workspace PVC access mode and claim size with CodeReady Workspaces deployment environment variables.

pv0001
  workspaceid1
  workspaceid2
  workspaceidn
    che-logs projects <volume1> <volume2>

To update a CodeReady Workspaces deployment:

The default pull policy is Always. The default tag is nightly. This tag sets the image pull policy to Always and triggers a new deployment with a newer image, if available.

To run more workspaces, add more nodes to your OpenShift cluster. An error message is returned when the system is out of resources.

To delete data or request the administrator to delete data, run this command with the user or administrator token:

$ curl -X DELETE http://che-server/api/user/{id}

To run CodeReady Workspaces Server in debug mode, set the following environment variable in the CodeReady Workspaces deployment to true (default is false):

CHE_DEBUG_SERVER=true

See OpenShift documentation.

Logs are persisted in a PV .The PVC che-data-volume is created and bound to a PV after CodeReady Workspaces deploys to OpenShift.

To retrieve logs, do one of the following:

It is also possible to configure CodeReady Workspaces master not to store logs, but produce JSON encoded logs to output instead. It may be used to collect logs by systems such as Logstash. To configure JSON logging instead of plain text environment variable CHE_LOGS_APPENDERS_IMPL should have value json.

Workspace logs are stored in an PV bound to che-claim-workspace PVC. Workspace logs include logs from workspace agent, bootstrapper and other agents if applicable.

The CodeReady Workspaces master has three possible states:

The PREPARING_TO_SHUTDOWN state means that no new workspace startups are allowed. This situation can cause two different results:

For those that did not stop, automatic fallback to the shutdown with full workspaces stopping will be performed.

If you want a full shutdown with workspaces stopped, you can request this by using the shutdown=true parameter. When preparation process is finished, the READY_TO_SHUTDOWN state is set which allows to stop current CodeReady Workspaces master instance.

The default grace termination period of OpenShift workspace pods is 0. This setting terminates pods almost instantly and significantly decreases the time required for stopping a workspace.

To increase the grace termination period, use the following environment variable: CHE_INFRA_KUBERNETES_POD_TERMINATION__GRACE__PERIOD__SEC.

CodeReady Workspaces Server includes a job that automatically stops workspace runtimes if their pods have been terminated. Pods are terminated when, for example, users remove them from the OpenShift console, administrators terminate them to prevent misuse, or an infrastructure node crashes.

The job is disabled by default to avoid problems in configurations where CodeReady Workspaces Server cannot interact with the Kubernetes API without user intervention.

The job cannot function with the following CodeReady Workspaces Server configuration:

The job can function with the following CodeReady Workspaces Server configurations:

To enable the job, set the CHE_INFRA_KUBERNETES_RUNTIMES__CONSISTENCY__CHECK__PERIOD__MIN environment variable to contain a value greater than 0. The value is the time period in minutes between checks for runtimes without pods.

The differences between a Recreate update and a Rolling update:

The fastest way to completely delete CodeReady Workspaces and its infrastructure components is to delete the project and namespace.

To delete CodeReady Workspaces and components:

$ oc delete namespace che

You can use selectors to delete particular deployments and associated objects.

To remove all CodeReady Workspaces server related objects:

$ oc delete all -l=app=che

To remove all Keycloak related objects:

$ oc delete all -l=app=keycloak

To remove all PostgreSQL-related objects:

$ oc delete all -l=app=postgres

PVCs, service accounts and role bindings should be deleted separately because oc delete all does not delete them.

To delete CodeReady Workspaces server PVC, ServiceAccount and RoleBinding:

$ oc delete sa -l=app=che
$ oc delete rolebinding -l=app=che

To delete Keycloak and PostgreSQL PVCs:

$ oc delete pvc -l=app=keycloak
$ oc delete pvc -l=app=postgres

Master server emits metrics in Prometheus format by default on port 8087 of the CodeReady Workspaces server host (this can be customized by the che.metrics.portconfiguration property).

You can configure your own Prometheus deployment to scrape the metrics (as per convention, the metrics are published on the <CHE_HOST>:8087/metrics endpoint).

The CodeReady Workspaces’s Helm chart can optionally install Prometheus and Grafana servers preconfigured to collect the metrics of the CodeReady Workspaces server. When you set the global.metricsEnabled value to true when installing CodeReady Workspaces’s Helm chart, Prometheus and Grafana servers are automatically deployed. The servers are accessible on prometheus-<CHE_NAMESPACE>.domain or grafana-<CHE_NAMESPACE>.domain domains respectively. The Grafana server is preconfigured with a sample dashboard showing the memory usage of the CodeReady Workspaces server. You can log in to the Grafana server using the predefined username admin with the default password admin.

You can register the OpenShift server as an identity provider when CodeReady Workspaces is installed in multi-user mode. This allows you to create workspace objects in the OpenShift namespace of the user that is logged in CodeReady Workspaces through Keycloak.

To create a workspace object in the namespace of the user that is logged into CodeReady Workspaces:

Every workspace action such as start or stop creates an OpenShift resource in the OpenShift user account. A notification message displays which allows you to link the Keycloak account to your OpenShift user account.

But for non-interactive workspace actions, such as workspace stop on idling or CodeReady Workspaces server shutdown, the dedicated OpenShift account configured for the Kubernetes infrastructure is used. See Setting up the project workspace for more information.

To install CodeReady Workspaces on OpenShift with this feature enabled, see Section 2.2.2, “Deploying CodeReady Workspaces with a self-signed certificate and OpenShift oAuth”.

To add the OpenShift identity provider:

See Keycloak documentation for more information on the Keycloak OpenShift identity provider.

To configure CodeReady Workspaces deployment:

If the certificate used by the OpenShift console is self-signed or is not trusted, then by default the Keycloak will not be able to contact the OpenShift console to retrieve linked tokens.

Keycloak cannot contact the OpenShift console to retrieve linked tokens when the certificate used by the OpenShift console is self-signed or is not trusted.

When the certificate is self-signed or is not trusted, use the OPENSHIFT_IDENTITY_PROVIDER_CERTIFICATE variable to pass the OpenShift console certificate to the Keycloak deployment. This will enable the Keycloak server to add the certificate to the list of trusted certificates. The environment variable refers to a secret that contains the certificate.