Setting up a Local Development Environment for OpenShift

So you are using OpenShift as your target platform (great choice!), but you need a local development environment? There is a lot of value in being able to run and test your application locally. With OpenShift this can be a bit of a challenge if you don’t know what’s out there. This blog post is intended to help offer some guidance to you.

There are a number of potential ways to go. The following is my recommendation based on experience and personal opinion.

Local development options

In my opinion, there are 3 rough options, in order of preference:

1. Code Ready Containers (CRC): A minimal but complete OpenShift stack locally
2. Podman (native on Linux, VM for other platforms): Podman is a daemon-less container runtime that supports OpenShift Pods and Deployment YAML directly
3. Docker: Docker will run containers but doesn’t support Pods or Deployments, so you are limited to running containers only (no testing OpenShift config locally)

OpenShift, Podman, and Docker

Generally speaking, regardless of your OS of choice, if you have a big enough machine to…