Article

Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.0

May 30, 2017
Linux Developer Tools
Lalatendu Mohanty
Guest Author
Red Hat CDK Red Hat Container Development Kit

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK) 3.0.

CDK 3.0 is based on Minishift, a CLI tool to provision and interact with a local single-node OpenShift cluster.

CDK 3.0 is a significant update to CDK 2.0 and aims to provide better usability and user experience. CDK 3.0 takes advantage of the native hypervisors on Windows (Hyper-V), macOS (Xhyve), and RHEL (KVM) and it also works with VirtualBox on all platforms.

In CDK, Minishift starts a RHEL7 virtual machine and provisions a single node OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) cluster on top of it. The VM also runs a docker daemon that can be used on the host machine.

To install CDK 3.0 refer to the Installation documentation.

Minishift feature highlights

Add-ons:

  • $ minishift add-ons
    • Add-ons act like plugins, which can be used to customize the default OpenShift instance.
    • By default, Minishift includes add-ons such as:
      • anyuid: Allows a container to run with any user ID the in the OpenShift. For example, you can run containers as the root user.
      • admin-user: Creates an “admin” user so that you can access the OpenShift web console as an administrator.

Share host folders in the Minishift VM:

  • $ minishift hostfolder
    • You can mount and share host folders to the Minishift VM.
    • After the folder is mounted onto the VM, you can then mount it onto a container or a pod.

Configure your shell to use the oc binary:

  • $ minishift oc-env
    • When you run the 'minishift start' command, an oc binary is cached to the local machine. This command enables you to reuse the oc binary to interact with the OpenShift cluster.

Persistent configuration:

  • $ minishift config
    • Enables you to set configuration properties and preserve them the next time you start Minishift, instead of setting flags each time you run the 'minishift start' command.

Ability to reuse Minishift's Docker daemon:   

  • $ minishift docker-env
    • Enables you to reuse the Docker daemon that runs inside the virtual machine on your local machines.

Integrated OpenShift container registry:

  • $ minishift openshift registry
    • OpenShift provides a container registry, which is used as a local container registry. Images from the container registry can be used to run applications in OpenShift.
    • For details, refer to the CDK documentation.

OpenShift version selection at start:

Feedback

We would love to hear your feedback. The Red Hat Container Tools mailing list is open to all. Please try CDK 3.0 and send us your feedback on the container tools at redhat.com mailing list.

Community

Minishift is an open-source project. The Minishift community hangs out at the #minishift IRC channel (https://freenode.net). You are welcome to join, participate in the discussions, and contribute.

Click here to download the Red Hat Container Development Kit and accept the terms and conditions of the Red Hat Developer Program, which provides no-cost subscriptions for development use only.

Last updated: November 15, 2018

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