Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.4 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.

Attempting to run minishift start with the --extra-clusterup-flags flag results in the following error:

$ MINISHIFT_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL=y minishift start --extra-clusterup-flags "--service-catalog"
....
-- Checking if provided oc flags are supported ... Flag 'extra-clusterup-flags' is not supported for oc version v3.9.14. Use 'openshift-version' flag to select a different version of OpenShift.
FAIL
Provided oc flag not supported

Workaround: Use the --logging, --metrics, and --service-catalog flags for each of these features respectively. For example:

$ MINISHIFT_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL=y minishift start --service-catalog

See Enabling Experimental oc cluster up Flags for more information.

Using minishift delete --clear-cache will remove the cached minishift-rhel7.iso file used to start the virtual machine. Attempting to start CDK after clearing the cache results in the following error:

Error starting the VM: Error creating the VM. Error creating machine: Error in driver during machine creation: open /home/user/.minishift/cache/iso/minishift-rhel7.iso: no such file or directory

Workaround: Run minishift setup-cdk followed by minishift start to recreate the cached minishift-rhel7.iso file and oc binary.

Attempting to remove the Che add-on via minishift addon remove results in the following error:

$ minishift addon remove che
-- Removing addon 'che':
[CHE] Removing Che server Template.
[CHE] Removing mini-che project..error: unable to find target [developer]
Error removing the add-on: Error executing command 'oc adm policy remove-role-from-user system:image-builder developer -n openshift'.

No workaround is required, as the Che add-on is removed despite this error.

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 the minishift openshift version list command. The tag will be in the format "v.X.Y.Z".

minishift console does not work on older versions of the Safari web browser such as version 10.1.2 (12603.3.8). Attempting to access the web console results in the following error:

Error unable to load details about the server

Retry after updating Safari to the latest version or use the Firefox or Chrome web browsers for this. Safari version 11.0.3 (13604.5.6) has been tested and works with the OpenShift web console. You can use minishift console --url to get the web console URL.

The experimental static IP feature is not possible with the Default Switch provided by Windows. The minishift virtual machine will receive an IP address, but network traffic will not be able to pass through it.

See Assign IP Address to Hyper-V for more information about how to assign a static IP address to the minishift VM on Windows.

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>'