Installing Red Hat OpenShift locally using Code Ready Containers (CRC)
A quick step-by-step guide to installing OpenShift on your local laptop
OpenShift Container Platform is a flagship container platform by RedHat which is hugely popular with many of our customers, especially because its available as managed service in Azure in the form of Azure RedHat OpenShift (ARO) and also available in other cloud providers.
As a developer or a member of the DevOps team, there are occasions you want to run a cluster on your local laptop and try a few things for yourself.
Red Hat provides something known as OpenShift Local — an OpenShift Container Platform which you can install on your laptop to do exactly that.
In this post, we will see how to get the cluster up and running locally using the OpenShift Local.
Download
You can download the installer from here: https://developers.redhat.com/products/openshift-local/overview
Installation
The installation steps below show it for Mac, your installation steps might slightly change for your specific operating system. You can find instructions here
The first step is to quickly run through the installer. There is nothing much to explain here.
Once the installation is complete, open the application, and you will be presented with the prompt to complete the setup.
You have an option to select the preset here, in my case, I selected OpenShift for having an OpenShift cluster environment.
The next step is to get the pull secret. The installed OpenShift cluster needs the pull secret to download key images from Red Hat’s container registry.
You can click the link in the wizard (highlighted above) and you will be taken to the page to copy the pull secret.
Review all changes click on Run setup
Once the wizard is complete, you can go to the terminal and check the version using crc version
For some reason though, I was not able to start the cluster using the menu bar icon.
Assuming, something was wrong with the setup, I ran crc setup again from the terminal. The output did not get show an error but still could not start the cluster.
So I tried starting the cluster again using crc start, that showed an error. This error suggested to me that it may be because I already had the previous version of the CRC (Code Ready Containers) cluster installed which left some files.
So as the last setup, I ran crc cleanup and tried to start the cluster again.
This time, there was no error and I started to see more in the logs. Eventually, after a few minutes the cluster was successfully started.
Starting the console
On Mac, you can start the console using the menu bar icon. Once the Cluster is started (you will see a green icon in the menu bar), you can click on Open Console to open the console.
You should be able to full cluster which you can use to test your container workloads locally.
