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OpenShift Container Platform CLI tools overview

A user performs a range of operations while working on OpenShift Container Platform such as the following:

  • Managing clusters

  • Building, deploying, and managing applications

  • Managing deployment processes

  • Developing Operators

  • Creating and maintaining Operator catalogs

OpenShift Container Platform offers a set of command-line interface (CLI) tools that simplify these tasks by enabling users to perform various administration and development operations from the terminal. These tools expose simple commands to manage the applications, as well as interact with each component of the system.

List of CLI tools

The following set of CLI tools are available in OpenShift Container Platform:

  • OpenShift CLI (oc): This is the most commonly used CLI tool by OpenShift Container Platform users. It helps both cluster administrators and developers to perform end-to-end operations across OpenShift Container Platform using the terminal. Unlike the web console, it allows the user to work directly with the project source code using command scripts.

  • Developer CLI (odo): The odo CLI tool helps developers focus on their main goal of creating and maintaining applications on OpenShift Container Platform by abstracting away complex Kubernetes and OpenShift Container Platform concepts. It helps the developers to write, build, and debug applications on a cluster from the terminal without the need to administer the cluster.

  • Helm CLI: Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes applications which enables defining, installing, and upgrading applications packaged as Helm charts. Helm CLI helps the user deploy applications and services to OpenShift Container Platform clusters using simple commands from the terminal.

  • Knative CLI (kn): The Knative (kn) CLI tool provides simple and intuitive terminal commands that can be used to interact with OpenShift Serverless components, such as Knative Serving and Eventing.

  • Pipelines CLI (tkn): OpenShift Pipelines is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution in OpenShift Container Platform, which internally uses Tekton. The tkn CLI tool provides simple and intuitive commands to interact with OpenShift Pipelines using the terminal.

  • opm CLI: The opm CLI tool helps the Operator developers and cluster administrators to create and maintain the catalogs of Operators from the terminal.

  • Operator SDK: The Operator SDK, a component of the Operator Framework, provides a CLI tool that Operator developers can use to build, test, and deploy an Operator from the terminal. It simplifies the process of building Kubernetes-native applications, which can require deep, application-specific operational knowledge.