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Understanding OpenShift Do

OpenShift Do (odo) is a fast and easy-to-use CLI tool for creating applications on OpenShift Container Platform. odo allows developers to concentrate on creating applications without the need to administrate an OpenShift Container Platform cluster itself. Creating deployment configurations, build configurations, service routes and other OpenShift Container Platform elements are all automated by odo.

Existing tools such as oc are more operations-focused and require a deep understanding of Kubernetes and OpenShift Container Platform concepts. odo abstracts away complex Kubernetes and OpenShift Container Platform concepts allowing developers to focus on what is most important to them: code.

Key features

odo is designed to be simple and concise with the following key features:

  • Simple syntax and design centered around concepts familiar to developers, such as projects, applications, and components.

  • Completely client based. No additional server other than OpenShift Container Platform is required for deployment.

  • Official support for Node.js and Java components.

  • Partial compatibility with languages and frameworks such as Ruby, Perl, PHP, and Python.

  • Detects changes to local code and deploys it to the cluster automatically, giving instant feedback to validate changes in real time.

  • Lists all the available components and services from the OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

Core concepts

Project

A project is your source code, tests, and libraries organized in a separate single unit.

Application

An application is a program designed for end users. An application consists of multiple microservices or components that work individually to build the entire application. Examples of applications: a video game, a media player, a web browser.

Component

A component is a set of Kubernetes resources which host code or data. Each component can be run and deployed separately. Examples of components: Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby.

Service

A service is software that your component links to or depends on. Examples of services: MariaDB, Jenkins, MySQL. In odo, services are provisioned from the OpenShift Service Catalog and must be enabled within your cluster.

Officially supported languages and corresponding container images

Table 1. Supported languages, container images, and package managers
Language Container image Package manager

Node.js

centos/nodejs-8-centos7

NPM

rhoar-nodejs/nodejs-8

NPM

bucharestgold/centos7-s2i-nodejs

NPM

rhscl/nodejs-8-rhel7

NPM

rhscl/nodejs-10-rhel7

NPM

Java

redhat-openjdk-18/openjdk18-openshift

Maven, Gradle

openjdk/openjdk-11-rhel8

Maven, Gradle

openjdk/openjdk-11-rhel7

Maven, Gradle

Listing available container images

The list of available container images is sourced from the cluster’s internal container registry and external registries associated with the cluster.

To list the available components and associated container images for your cluster:

  1. Log in to the OpenShift Container Platform cluster with odo:

    $ odo login -u developer -p developer

  2. List the available odo supported and unsupported components and corresponding container images:

    $ odo catalog list components
Odo Supported OpenShift Components:
NAME        PROJECT      TAGS
java       openshift     8,latest
nodejs     openshift     10,8,8-RHOAR,latest

Odo Unsupported OpenShift Components:
NAME                      PROJECT       TAGS
dotnet                    openshift     1.0,1.1,2.1,2.2,latest
fuse7-eap-openshift       openshift     1.3

    The TAGS column represents the available image versions, for example, 10 represents the rhoar-nodejs/nodejs-10 container image.