accessing-openshift.adoc

Accessing OpenShift

OpenShift is a multi tenant system capable of supporting multiple users at the same time. To do anything within an OpenShift environment you must first login. Once you have access, before you can deploy any application, you must also have a project to deploy it into.

In this set of exercises you will login into the OpenShift environment and create a project to work in.

Logging in from the command line

In order to login using the oc command line client, run the command:

oc login {{CONSOLE_ADDRESS}}

You may see the following output:

The server uses a certificate signed by an unknown authority.
You can bypass the certificate check, but any data you send to the server could be intercepted by others.
Use insecure connections? (y/n):

The reason you received this message is because the OpenShift environment being used for this workshop is using a self-signed certificate. In a real-world scenario, either OpenShift’s certificate would be signed by a standard CA (eg: Thawte, Verisign, StartSSL, etc.) or signed by a corporate-standard CA that you already have installed on your system.

Respond with Y to accept the use of the self signed certificate and continue.

Note	On some versions of Microsoft Windows, you may get an error that the server has an invalid x.509 certificate. If you receive this error, use the following command instead: oc login {{CONSOLE_ADDRESS}} --insecure-skip-tls-verify=true

Once you issue the oc login command, you will be prompted for the user name and password.

Enter in the credentials for your assigned user account:

Username: userXX
Password: userXX

When you have been authenticated successfully, you will see the following confirmation message:

Login successful.

You don't have any projects. You can try to create a new project, by running

    oc new-project <projectname>

Creating a new project

Projects are a top level concept to help you organize your deployments. An OpenShift project allows a community of users (or a single user) to organise and manage their content in isolation from other communities.

Each project can have its own resources, policies (who can or cannot perform actions), and constraints (quotas and limits on resources, etc).

Projects act as a "wrapper" around all the application services and endpoints you (or your teams) are using for your work.

Before you can deploy the Python web application used in this workshop, you need to create a new project in which to deploy it. As you are working in a shared OpenShift environment, you need to use a unique name for your project. Create a new project which incorporates your user name by running:

oc new-project project-userXX

You should see the following message to confirm the creation of the project.

Now using project "project-userXX" on server "https://{{CONSOLE_ADDRESS}}".

You can add applications to this project with the 'new-app' command. For example, try:

    oc new-app centos/ruby-22-centos7~https://github.com/openshift/ruby-ex.git

to build a new example application in Ruby.

Logging into the web console

In addition to the command line client, OpenShift ships with a web console. The web console provides you with the ability to perform many common tasks as well as get a visual overview of the applications you have deployed.

To login to the web console for the OpenShift environment used in this workshop, visit the URL:

https://{{CONSOLE_ADDRESS}}

As with logging in from the command line, you may get an error due to the use of a self signed certificate. Add an exception to allow the browser to communicate with the web site. The first screen you should then see will be the user authentication screen.

Enter in the credentials for your assigned user account:

Username: userXX
Password: userXX

After you have authenticated to the web console, you will be presented with a list of projects that your user has permission to work with. You should be able to see the project you created above from the command line.

Click on the project you created and you should be taken to the project overview page.

The overview page will list details about any applications you have deployed in the project. As you haven’t yet deployed any application, there is nothing to display and the overview page will prompt you to add an application. Don’t select it just yet, we will get to deploying an application later.

If metrics have been enabled in the OpenShift environment being used for this workshop, because a self signed certificate is being used, you will see a message indicating that an error occurred getting metrics.

Click on the the link that says Open metrics URL, and add an exception for the certificate. This will enable any charts for metrics to be displayed in the web console.

In the remainder of this workshop you will be using both the command line and the web console.