Chapter 2. Getting started
This chapter covers
- Accessing your cluster and logging in
- Creating projects and deploying applications
- Accessing your application by creating routes
- Investigating application components
- Comparing command-line and web workflows
There are three ways to interact with OpenShift: the command line, the web interface, and the RESTful API. This chapter focuses on deploying applications using the command line, because the command line exposes more of the process that’s used to create containerized applications in OpenShift. In other chapters, the examples may use the web interface or even the API. Our intention is to give you the most real-world examples of using OpenShift. We want to show you the best tools to get the various jobs done.
We’ll also try our best not to make you repeat yourself. Almost every action in OpenShift can be performed using all three access methods. If something is limited, we’ll do our best to let you know. But we want you to get the best experience possible from using OpenShift. With that said, in this chapter we’re going to repeat ourselves. But we have a good reason!
The most common task in OpenShift is deploying an application. Because this is the most common task, we want to introduce you to it as early as practical, using both the command line and the web interface. So please bear with us. This chapter may seem a little repetitive, but we think the repetition will be helpful as you continue to learn how to use OpenShift.