Running OpenShift Local on Windows

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Recently had the requirement for testing within OpenShift; an cloud cluster wasn’t available so enter RedHat OpenShift Local (or cloud ready containers)[https://freedomben.medium.com/setting-up-a-local-development-environment-for-openshift-ceaaf3d2c2d9]

Context - I run windows 11, but use WSL2 for all development. VSCode works well here, and I’ve run quite happily with KIND and KS9 as a dev environment

Run inside WSL2

TL;DR; no, couldn’t get it to work; attempted steps below. Despite the output saying it had spotted WSL2 in use!

  • Needs to have SystemD - but with Windows 11 and WSL2 that is resolved
  • Issues with the network mode resolved with crc config set network-mode user
  • crc setup works now
  • crc start nope, there’s a problem with port 6443 something else is using it (that I can’t find)

Run inside multipass VM

  • No systemd

Run inside Hyper-V Fedora VM

  • Installed Fedora
  • How do I get the files onto the machine, it seems that there’s no CLI way to download OpenShift Local
    • after ‘faffing’ with host services and power shell snippets that claimed to copy to Hyper-V VMs realised that I had scp installed via OpenSSL - and a simple scp command was enough
  • Configured the vm to be able to access the virtualiztion options
Set-VMProcessor -VMName <VMName> -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true
  • Seemed to start ok, but for some reason with the ‘expandable’ virtual HDD, Fedora doesn’t seem to work well.
  • Ran out of disk space.

Run on Windows directly

  • Donwloaded the MSI installer
  • Ran ok, rebooted, looked for an installed ‘app’; none it’s all CLI (fair enough)
  • Run crc setup from elevated powershell If you get into issues with crc setup stopping after the check on users, check this issue
$env:USERNAME="${env:USERDOMAIN}\${env:USERNAME}"

Its the domain prefix of the username that needs to be added.

  • need a non-elevated powershell to run crc start and the username update