Configuring Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces
The Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces Administration Guide covers all the required steps for checking prerequisites, preparing the installation, installing, and configuring the running environment. This page will cover some special considerations for Z Open Editor and Zowe Explorer use cases.
Configuration suggestions
Public Open VSX server
The default installation of OpenShift Dev Spaces uses a built-in instance of the Open VSX VS Code extensions marketplace. However, Z Open Editor and Zowe Explorer are not included in this registry so they cannot be found from within a running a workspace. An easy workaround is to switch Dev Spaces to use the public https://open-vsx.org site instead, which is documented in the Administration Guide.
If you are running your OpenShift cluster in an air-gapped installation or without a public gateway then it is possible to add these and other extensions to the so-called "plugin registry" of Dev Spaces, which is described here.
Image Puller
The Kubernetes Image Puller is used for caching images on a cluster. It creates a separate Pod downloading and running the relevant container on each node. This allows for faster start up times for IBM Wazi for Dev Spaces. In order to retrieve the list images that would enable faster start up times for Dev Spaces, gather a list of relevant container images to pull by navigating to the URL https://<replace-devspaces-url>/plugin-registry/v3/external_images.txt.
- Installing the Image Puller on x86 based OpenShift Container Platform Cluster: The Community Operators Catalog contains the Kubernetes Image Puller available on x86 based Clusters. You can use the web console to install the Kubernetes Image Puller and configure the Dev Spaces custom resource based on the requirements that are specified on this page.
- Installing the Image Puller on s390x based OpenShift Container Platform Cluster: The Kubernetes Image Puller cannot be installed using the Operator Hub on s390x based OpenShift Container Platform clusters. Therefore, it would be required to install and configure the Kubernetes Image Puller using the CLI by following the instructions that are listed here.
Configuring Git integrations
OpenShift Dev Spaces provides many different ways of integrating with various Git-server technologies such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. The Administration Guide provides instructions for how to configure identities and authorizations to these servers provides by administrators.
In addition the Dev Spaces User Guide covers many scenarios for using Git repositories, such as how to use these centrally managed authentications, work with access tokens, defining your personal Git configurations, and many more. This documentation also has a section on managing secrets that has content related to Git.
Other useful configuring settings
There are many parameters in the Dev Spaces custom resource to configure Dev Spaces behavior. The Administration Guide has a complete reference of all parameters.
The following table lists some commonly used parameters that we found useful for Z Open Editor and Zowe Explorer that you could explore first. Note, that some of these can have a big impact on resource usage and cost of operation:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
maxNumberOfRunningWorkspacesPerUser | The maximum number of running workspaces per user. The value, -1, allows users to run an unlimited number of workspaces. |
secondsOfInactivityBeforeIdling | Idle timeout for workspaces in seconds. This timeout is the duration after which a workspace will be idled if there is no activity. To disable workspace idling due to inactivity, set this value to -1. |
startTimeoutSeconds | The amount of time a workspace startup times out. The default value of 300 seconds sometimes needs to be increase when pulling very large images with a slow network connection to the registry. |
storage | Workspaces persistent storage strategy. See below for more details. |
To get a complete list of parameters used to configure and customize your workspace, see here.
Common issues
Storage
We see that administrators deploying Dev Spaces on OpenShift fail to provide storage for their OpenShift clusters that meet the storage class requirements specified. In addition to providing the correct storage classes it also necessary to set the matching storage strategy settings for the Dev Spaces operation. See the Configuring storage section of the administrator guide for details. Also read the OpenShift Understanding persistent storage documentation page for more background. For the optimal user experience we recommend "ReadWriteMany" storage with a "per-workspace" or "per-user" strategy.
Other resources
A collection of important references for maintaining and using Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces to be shared with the end users as well.
- IBM Developer for z/OS on Dev Spaces GitHub repository
- Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces Administration Guide
- Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces User Guide
- Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces home page and blog
- Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces security best practices
- Eclipse Che Blog
- Customizing Eclipse Che Cloud Development Environments