Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.0 introduces Minishift, a new command-line tool to provision OpenShift locally for application developers to develop application for OpenShift. It supports all native hypervisors:

Aditionaly, VirtualBox can also be used on all platforms.

Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.0:

Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.0 offers improved user experience:

The minishift start --metrics command does not work due to a permission issue with cassandra pod. Please note that this feature is considered experimental. There is no workaround at this time.

The command minishift ssh returns an error value and prints a message if exiting ssh after an error. This error appears to not affect any other functionality, and may be safely ignored.

~]$ minishift ssh
Last login: Tue Apr  4 09:24:43 2017 from 192.168.42.1
[~]$ mistake
-bash: mistake: command not found
~]$ exit
logout
E0404 09:31:11.723209    5180 ssh.go:38] Cannot establish SSH connection to the VM:  exit status 127

Installing and simultaneously enabling local minishift addons results in an error message printed. In some cases, the addon will be installed and enabled and the error may be safely ignored.

~]$ `minishift addons install addons/expose-registry --enable`
Unable to enable add-on registry: Unable to find addon registry in addon directory /Users/CDK/.minishift/addons

Users need to have ssh.exe in their path before using minishift with Hyper-V. The Golang ssh implementation does not work in Microsoft Windows, so users will need to install that via another method. Installing Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio is a solution, to provide cygwin’s ssh. If using Cygwin, users need to have its /bin directory in their PATH variable, for ssh to be available. Container Development Kit users who do not install Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio may instead install install mingw as a workaround.

The minishift oc-env command used in CMD on Windows returns a command which removes everything except the oc binary from path. The workaround is to run oc-env, and then add a semicolon ";" to the end of SET command returned by oc-env.

C:\Users\CDK> SET PATH=C:\Users\CDK\.minishift\cache\oc\v3.5.5.8;%PATH%
C:\Users\CDK> echo %PATH%
C:\Users\CDK\.minishift\cache\oc\v3.5.5.8;%PATH%

Microsoft Windows CMD and PowerShell have problems with parsing JSON into minishift openshift config set command. Special attention needed from user when using this command on Windows. The workaround is to use exact and verified example commands as mentioned on github.

C:\Users\CDK> minishift openshift config set --patch '{"corsAllowedOrigins": [".*"]}'
The specified patch need to be valid JSON.

The workaround for Microsoft Windows CMD environments is to escape the quotes so that the JSON is correctly parsed:

C:\Users\CDK> minishift.exe openshift config set --patch "{\"routingConfig\": {\"subdomain\": \"192.168.99.101.nip.io\"}}"

For Powershell v2 environments on Microsoft Windows, the workaround is to use a variable to store the JSON code:

C:\Users\CDK\minishift> $json='{\"routingConfig\": {\"subdomain\": \"192.168.99.101.nip.io\"}}'
C:\Users\CDK\minishift> echo $jason
{\"routingConfig\": {\"subdomain\": \"192.168.99.101.nip.io\"}}
C:\Users\CDK\minishift> minishift.exe openshift config set --patch $jason
Patching OpenShift configuration /var/lib/origin/openshift.local.config/master/master-config.yaml with {"routingConfig": {"subdomain": "192.168.99.101.nip.io"}}
Restarting OpenShift