Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.2 is based on Minishift, a command-line tool to provision OpenShift locally for application developers. It supports all native hypervisors and some additional ones:

Support for these features falls under the Technology Preview Features Support Scope.

Running minishift --profile <name> setup-cdk without an existing MINISHIFT_HOME (~/.minishift by default) prevents the setup-cdk command from creating the default minishift profile. This will cause further problems, as CDK expects the default profile to be present.

Workaround: Do not use the global --profile flag with minishift setup-cdk. Always run minishift setup-cdk before any other command for a new installation of CDK.

Currently, CDK cannot automatically download the oc binary for OpenShift Container Platform 3.7. However, you may manually download the oc 3.7 binary to use it. To do so, follow these steps:

$ minishift start --ocp-tag v3.7.0.0.198.0

The minishift start command only creates the MINISHIFT_HOME/.machines/<vm_name>_kubeconfig file the first time a Minishift VM is started. If the minishift start procedure fails for any reason, this file may not be created. Running minishift start again will not create this file. This causes issues with the minishift openshift registry and minishift openshift service commands.

Workaround: Run minishift delete followed by minishift start to create the required file.

The command used for registration during minishift start is printed to the console if the registration process fails. This command contains the given Red Hat user name and password in plain text.

Example output:

Error to register VM: ssh command error:
command : sudo -E subscription-manager register --auto-attach --username user@redhat.com --password 'xxxxxxxx'
err     : exit status 1
output  : Registering to: subscription.rhsm.redhat.com:443/subscription
The system has been registered with ID: 9bf93a9c-3615-428d-953d-70803121ebf7

Calling the minishift version command before running minishift setup-cdk causes the default MINISHIFT_HOME directory (~/.minishift) to be created. This leads to minishift setup-cdk prompting for confirmation to overwrite the contents of MINISHIFT_HOME.

Workaround: Type y to confirm. This warning may be ignored.

The --ocp-tag flag for the minishift start command does not support the "latest" tag.

Workaround: If you want to use any OCP image other than the default, you need to find the version number of the specific image you want and select that version. You can find the image using --ocp-tag help. The tag will be in the format "v.X.Y.Z".

The pre-flight check used by minishift start will fail if the operating system’s locale is not English. This is due to the check for active libvirt networks testing for English-specific text.

Workaround: Export LC_ALL=C to the shell environment of Linux:

$ export LC_ALL=C
$ minishift start

Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell have problems with parsing JSON into the minishift openshift config set command. Special attention is required when using this command on Windows.

The workaround for Windows Command Prompt environments is to escape the quotes so that the JSON content is correctly parsed:

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

The workaround for Windows PowerShell environments is to use a variable to store the JSON content:

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

The reason for this failure is currently unknown.

Workaround: Configure the OpenShift cluster from inside of the provisioned VM using minishift ssh:

C:\Users\CDK> minishift.exe ssh
[docker@minishift ~]$ docker exec -t origin /usr/bin/openshift ex config patch /var/lib/origin/openshift.local.config/master/master-config.yaml --patch='<json-to-be-applied-to-the-cluster>'