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Routes

Overview

An OpenShift route exposes a service at a host name, like www.example.com, so that external clients can reach it by name.

DNS resolution for a host name is handled separately from routing; your administrator may have configured a cloud domain that will always correctly resolve to the OpenShift router, or if using an unrelated host name you may need to modify its DNS records independently to resolve to the router.

Creating Routes

Tooling for creating routes is developing. In the web console, they are displayed but there is not yet a method to create them. Using the CLI, you currently can create only an unsecured route:

$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname=<www.example.com>

The new route inherits the name from the service unless you specify one.

Example 1. An Unsecured Route YAML Definition
apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-name
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name

Unsecured routes are the default configuration, and are therefore the simplest to set up. However, secured routes offer security for connections to remain private. To create a secured HTTPS route encrypted with a key and certificate (PEM-format files which you must generate and sign separately), you must edit the unsecured route to add TLS termination.

TLS is the replacement of SSL for HTTPS and other encrypted protocols.

 
$ oc edit route/<name>
Example 2. A Secure Route Using Edge Termination
apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-name
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name
  tls:
    termination: edge
    key: |-
      -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
      [...]
      -----END PRIVATE KEY-----
    certificate: |-
      -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
      [...]
      -----END CERTIFICATE-----
    caCertificate: |-
      -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
      [...]
      -----END CERTIFICATE-----

You can specify a secured route without a key and certificate, in which case the router’s default certificate will be used for TLS termination.

TLS termination in OpenShift relies on SNI for serving custom certificates. Any non-SNI traffic received on port 443 is handled with TLS termination and a default certificate, which may not match the requested host name, resulting in validation errors.

Further information on all types of TLS termination as well as path-based routing are available in the Architecture section.