OpenShift for Developers: Set Up a Full Cluster in Under 30 Minutes

February 28, 2018: This video has been updated, please see Installing OpenShift 3.7.1 in Under 30 Minutes for more recent instructions.

One of the common questions I get asked by developers is how they can use OpenShift locally for their own development. Luckily, we have a lot of different options and selecting one depends on the specific development environment that you prefer to work with.

For example, if you prefer to have things working in a virtual machine without having to worry too much about the installation, the all-in-one or official CDK is probably what you are after. These two options utilize Vagrant and VirtualBox with a major difference being that the all-in-one uses the open source Origin project and the CDK uses the enterprise version called OpenShift Container Platform.

One of my favorite ways of using OpenShift locally is to use oc cluster up. This is a fantastic tool that I use on a daily basis but I suggest you also take a look at the oc cluster wrapper project that my team codes and supports. The oc cluster wrapper project was created to help developers out a bit further by automating a lot of tasks such as profile management and persistent volumes.

After you play around with OpenShift locally, you will come to the realization that you would enjoy having a 24/7 install of OpenShift that you can publicly host your projects on. This is where a lot of Developers stumble because they aren’t system administrators. For that reason, I took some time to create a video that shows how to install OpenShift Origin 1.4 from start to finish. This means that I create a bare virtual machine, install the operating system, install dependencies (like docker), and then use ansible to install OpenShift. After the install, I then show how to setup wildcard DNS for a public hostname. All in under 30 minutes.

I hope you enjoy the video and using OpenShift Origin 1.4!