Announcing our All-In-One OpenShift VM

Sporks, handy like an OpenShift VM

Greetings Shifters (and those who love them)! Today I am happy to announce the "delivery" of something we have been working with the OpenShift Engineers for a little while now. We now have an "all-in-one" Vagrant image of OpenShift V3!

This image is based off of OpenShift Origin and is a fully functioning OpenShift instance with an integrated Docker registry. The intent of this project is to allow Web developers and other interested parties to run OpenShift V3 on their own computer. Given the way it is configured, the VM will appear to your local machine as if it was running somewhere off the machine.

Purpose of this image

You can use this image if you want to do local application development and testing. It was originally built to use for our Summit workshops but there has been a lot of interest in it's use. As long as you pre-cache the Docker images, you can even use this image without a connection to the intertubes.

CAUTION:
We wanted to allow developers to use any Docker image they want, which required us turning off some security in OpenShift. By default, OpenShift will not allow a container to run as root or even a non-random platform assigned userid. Most Docker images in the Dockerhub do not follow this best practice and instead run as root. As a double negative, a large majority of Dockerhub images are not patched for well known vulnerabilities. Therefore, please use images from Dockerhub with caution. We think some of the risk is mitigated because you are running OpenShift in a VM, but still - be careful which Docker images you run.

To run the image, you need a recent version of VirtualBox (a FOSS virtualization solution that runs on all the major platforms) and Vagrant (I test with VirtualBox 4.3.30 and Vagrant 1.7.2). The Vagrant Box image is about 2.5 Gigs. We have also included links to the command line binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You just need to unzip the binaries and put them somewhere you can use them.

The best way to get started is to download all the pieces and then read the document which contains set-up instructions and a set of exercises to familiarize you with the developer experience on OpenShift V3.

Where to get it the OpenShift VM

So download it and give it a try. I would love to get your feedback on the usability of the image, your experience with OpenShift V3 as an application developer, and anything else you feel like sharing. Happy application building and welcome to the platform for the future!