Chapter 1. Introducing Red Hat OpenShift Local

1.1. About Red Hat OpenShift Local

Red Hat OpenShift Local brings a minimal OpenShift Container Platform 4 cluster and Podman container runtime to your local computer. These runtimes provide minimal environments for development and testing purposes. Red Hat OpenShift Local is mainly targeted at running on developers' desktops. For other OpenShift Container Platform use cases, such as headless or multi-developer setups, use the full OpenShift installer.

See the OpenShift Container Platform documentation for a full introduction to OpenShift Container Platform.

Red Hat OpenShift Local includes the crc command-line interface (CLI) to interact with the Red Hat OpenShift Local instance using the desired container runtime.

1.2. Differences from a production OpenShift Container Platform installation

The OpenShift preset for Red Hat OpenShift Local provides a regular OpenShift Container Platform installation with the following notable differences:

  • The OpenShift Container Platform cluster is ephemeral and is not intended for production use.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Local does not have a supported upgrade path to newer OpenShift Container Platform versions. Upgrading the OpenShift Container Platform version may cause issues that are difficult to reproduce.
  • It uses a single node which behaves as both a control plane and worker node.
  • It disables the Cluster Monitoring Operator by default. This disabled Operator causes the corresponding part of the web console to be non-functional.
  • The OpenShift Container Platform cluster runs in a virtual machine known as an instance. This may cause other differences, particularly with external networking.

The OpenShift Container Platform cluster provided by Red Hat OpenShift Local also includes the following non-customizable cluster settings. These settings should not be modified:

  • Use of the *.crc.testing domain.

  • The address range used for internal cluster communication.

    • The cluster uses the 172 address range. This can cause issues when, for example, a proxy is run in the same address space.