Creating OpenShift components with odo interactive mode

If you’re familiar with OpenShift Do (odo), a developer-focused command-line tool for Red Hat OpenShift, then you know that one of its primary goals is to make it easier to do fast, iterative development. Even experienced odo users, however, may not be familiar with odo’s interactive mode, which simplifies the process of creating components and services even further.

Interactive mode for components

In odo, we consider applications to be made up of one or more components. You can think of a component as similar to a microservice. Each component has a specific type, and odo supports multiple component types, such as Node.js, Java, and Python. Running odo catalog list components will give you a list of the component types that are supported on your cluster.

To create a component configuration, at a minimum, you need to tell odo which component type to use when creating a component. However, you can also specify several other options, such as component name, which ports to expose, environment variables, and more. Interactive mode guides you through the process of determining which of these options may be applicable to your component.

Reading about an interactive mode doesn’t do it justice, so here’s a live example of using it to create component configuration for a Node.js component with the name frontend-kiosk and port 8080 exposed.

If you already know the command syntax for odo, you could run this all in one command:

odo create nodejs frontend-kiosk --port 8080

But if you’re new to odo, prefer a guided process, or aren’t familiar with some of the arguments, the interactive mode can be very helpful.

Interactive mode for services

A service is typically a database or other service that a component links to or depends on, such as MongoDB or Jenkins. These services come from the OpenShift Service Catalog, which must be enabled on your cluster in order to use this feature. Running odo catalog list services will give you a list of the services that are available to you.

Creating a service configuration can be more complex than creating a component configuration, because there can be more options for services and they vary according to the type of service being created.

Here’s an example of creating a MongoDB database service using interactive mode:

Try it yourself

Whether you’re an experienced odo user who hasn’t tried interactive mode or you’ve never used odo at all, grab the latest version of odo and give it a try! Odo is currently in beta, and we want to hear your feedback on interactive mode or any other features that would make the tool even easier to use.

To install odo, head to the project’s page and read the installation instructions. Another way to try odo is through this interactive tutorial. If you have any feedback, please open an issue on the project’s GitHub repository. Learn more about development on openshift at developers.redhat.com/openshift.