Minishift

What Is the OKD Architecture?

OKD is a platform for developing and running containerized applications. OKD has a microservices-based architecture of smaller, decoupled units that work together. It runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster, with data about the objects stored in etcd, a reliable clustered key-value store. Those services are broken down by function:

REST APIs, which expose each of the core objects.
Controllers, which read those APIs, apply changes to other objects, and report status or write back to the object.

OKD Architecture Overview

For more information on the node types in the architecture overview, see Kubernetes Infrastructure.

Minishift Quickstart

OKD also offers a comprehensive web console and the custom OpenShift CLI (oc) interface. The interaction with OpenShift is with the command line tool oc which is copied to your host.

Pre-requisite

We will need 1 VM to create a single node kubernetes cluster using minishift. We are using following setting for this purpose:

1 Linux machine, ubuntu-22.04-x86_64 or your choice of Ubuntu OS image, cpu-a.4 flavor with 4vCPU, 8GB RAM, 20GB storage - also assign Floating IP to this VM.
setup Unique hostname to the machine using the following command:

echo "<node_internal_IP> <host_name>" >> /etc/hosts
hostnamectl set-hostname <host_name>

For example,

echo "192.168.0.134 minishift" >> /etc/hosts
hostnamectl set-hostname minishift

Install MiniShift on Ubuntu

Run the below command on the Ubuntu VM:

SSH into minishift machine
Switch to root user: sudo su

You will need to set up the virtualization environment before installing MiniShift.

Update the repositories and packages:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

Install libvirt and qemu-kvm on your system:

apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon libvirt-daemon-system -y

Create group if does not exist:

addgroup libvirtd
adduser $(whoami) libvirtd

Add yourself to the libvirt(d) group:

usermod -a -G libvirt $(whoami)

OR,

usermod -a -G libvirt $USER

Update your current session to apply the group change:

newgrp libvirtd

As root, install the KVM driver binary and make it executable as follows:

curl -L https://github.com/dhiltgen/docker-machine-kvm/releases/download/v0.10.0/docker-machine-driver-kvm-ubuntu16.04
-o /usr/bin/docker-machine-driver-kvm
chmod +x /usr/bin/docker-machine-driver-kvm

Check the status of libvirtd:

systemctl is-active libvirtd

If libvirtd is not active, start the libvirtd service:

systemctl start libvirtd

Download the archive for your operating system from the Minishift Releases page.

curl -LO https://github.com/minishift/minishift/releases/download/v1.34.3/minishift-1.34.3-linux-amd64.tgz

Unzip and Copy MiniShift in your path

tar -zxvf minishift-1.34.3-linux-amd64.tgz --strip=1 -C/usr/bin minishift-1.34.3-linux-amd64/minishift

Starting Minishift

By running the command: minishift start

!!! note "Note": cpu, and start memory, If you do not specify a disk-size 2vCPU, 4GB memory, with 20GB disk. Other customized minishift can be started following this format: minishift start --openshift-version v3.11.0 --iso-url centos --cpus 4 \ --memory 12GB --disk-size 60GB

minishift start
-- Starting local OpenShift cluster using 'kvm' hypervisor...
...
OpenShift server started.

The server is accessible via web console at:
    https://192.168.42.226:8443/console

You are logged in as:
    User:     developer
    Password: <any value> #pragma: allowlist secret

To login as administrator:
    oc login -u system:admin

Note

The IP is dynamically generated for each OpenShift cluster. To check the IP, run the minishift ip command.
By default, Minishift uses the driver most relevant to the host OS. To use a different driver, set the --vm-driver flag in minishift start. For example, to use VirtualBox instead of KVM on Linux operating systems, run minishift start --vm-driver=virtualbox. To persistent configuration so that you to run minishift start without explicitly passing i.e. in global scope the --vm-driver virtualbox flag each time, run: minishift config set vm-driver virtualbox.

You can run this command in a shell after starting Minishift to get the URL of the Web console:

minishift console --url

Use minishift oc-env to display the command you need to type into your shell in order to add the oc binary to your PATH environment variable. The output of oc-env will differ depending on OS and shell type.

$ minishift oc-env
export PATH="/root/.minishift/cache/oc/v3.11.0/linux:$PATH"
# Run this command to configure your shell:
# eval $(minishift oc-env)

Deploying a Sample Application

OpenShift provides various sample applications, such as templates, builder applications, and quickstarts. The following steps describe how to deploy a sample Node.js application from the command line.

Create a Node.js example app:

oc new-app https://github.com/sclorg/nodejs-ex -l name=myapp

Track the build log until the app is built and deployed:

oc logs -f bc/nodejs-ex

Expose a route to the service:

oc expose svc/nodejs-ex

Access the application:

minishift openshift service nodejs-ex --in-browser

To stop Minishift, use the following command:

minishift stop
Stopping local OpenShift cluster...
Stopping "minishift"...

Updating Minishift

minishift update

Uninstalling Minishift

Delete the Minishift VM and any VM-specific files:

minishift delete

This command deletes everything in the $MINISHIFT_HOME/.minishift/machines/minishift directory. Other cached data and the persistent configuration are not removed.

To completely uninstall Minishift, delete everything in the MINISHIFT_HOME directory (default ~/.minishift) and ~/.kube:

rm -rf ~/.minishift
rm -rf ~/.kube

With your hypervisor management tool, confirm that there are no remaining artifacts related to the Minishift VM. For example, if you use KVM, you need to run the virsh command.

Connecting to the Minishift VM with SSH

You can use the minishift ssh command to interact with the Minishift VM.

minishift ssh -- docker ps
CONTAINER    IMAGE                COMMAND                CREATED   STATUS       NAMES
71fe8ff16548 openshift/origin:... "/usr/bin/openshift s" 1 sec ago Up 1 second  origin