Installing your IBM Cloud Pak by mirroring Cloud Pak images to a private container registry (with ibm-pak plug-in)

If your cluster is not connected to the internet, you can install the IBM Cloud Pak in your cluster via connected or disconnected mirroring.

If you have a host that can access both the internet and your mirror registry, but not your cluster nodes, you can directly mirror the content from that machine. This process is referred to as connected mirroring. If you have no such host, you must mirror the images to a file system and then bring that host or removable media into your restricted environment. This process is referred to as disconnected mirroring.

Before you begin

You must complete the steps in the following sections before you begin generating mirror manifests:

Important: If you intend to install by using a private container registry, your cluster must support ImageDigestMirrorSet (IDMS) or ImageContentSourcePolicy (ICSP).

Prerequisites

Regardless of whether you plan to mirror the images with a bastion host or to the file system, you must satisfy the following prerequisites:

Allowlisted sites and ports for using a private container registry
Site Description
  • icr.io
  • cp.icr.io
  • dd0.icr.io
  • dd2.icr.io
  • dd4.icr.io
  • dd6.icr.io

If you're located in China, you must also allow the following hosts:

  • dd1-icr.ibm-zh.com
  • dd3-icr.ibm-zh.com
  • dd5-icr.ibm-zh.com
  • dd7-icr.ibm-zh.com
 Allowing these hosts, on port 443, provides access to the IBM Cloud Container Registry, CASE OCI artifact, and IBM Cloud Pak foundational services catalog source
github.com Github houses CASE files and IBM Cloud Pak tools
redhat.com Red Hat registries required per Configuring your firewall for OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform upgrades.

Notes:

Prepare a host

If you are in an air-gapped environment, you must be able to connect a host to the internet and mirror registry for connected mirroring or mirror images to file system which can be brought to a restricted environment for disconnected mirroring. For information on the latest supported operating systems, see ibm-pak plugin install documentation.

The following table explains the software requirements for mirroring the IBM Cloud Pak images:

Table 1. Software requirements and purpose
Software Purpose
Docker Container management
Podman Container management
Red Hat OpenShift CLI (oc) Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform administration

Complete the following steps on your host:

  1. Install Docker or Podman.

    To install Docker (for example, on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®), run the following commands:

    Note: If you are installing as a non-root user you must use sudo. For more information, refer to the Podman or Docker documentation for installing as a non-root user.

    yum check-update
yum install docker

    To install Podman, see Podman Installation Instructions.

  2. Install the oc Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform CLI tool.

  3. Download and install the most recent version of IBM Catalog Management Plug-in for IBM Cloud Paks from the IBM/ibm-pak. Extract the binary file by entering the following command:

    tar -xf oc-ibm_pak-linux-amd64.tar.gz

    Run the following command to move the file to the /usr/local/bin directory:

    Note: If you are installing as a non-root user you must use sudo. For more information, refer to the Podman or Docker documentation for installing as a non-root user.

    mv oc-ibm_pak-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/oc-ibm_pak

    Note: Download the plug-in based on the host operating system. You can confirm that oc ibm-pak -h is installed by running the following command:

    oc ibm-pak --help

    The plug-in usage is displayed.

    For more information on plug-in commands, see command-help.

    The plug-in is also provided in a container image cp.icr.io/cpopen/cpfs/ibm-pak:TAG where TAG should be replaced with the corresponding plug-in version, for example cp.icr.io/cpopen/cpfs/ibm-pak:v1.2.0 will have v1.2.0 of the plug-in.

    The following command creates a container and copy the plug-ins for all the supported platforms in a directory, plugin-dir. You can specify any directory name and it will be created while copying. After copying, it will delete the temporary container. The plugin-dir has all the binaries and other artifacts you find in a GitHub release and repo at IBM/ibm-pak.

    id=$(docker create cp.icr.io/cpopen/cpfs/ibm-pak:TAG - )
docker cp $id:/ibm-pak plugin-dir
docker rm -v $id
cd plugin-dir

Creating registry namespaces

Top-level namespaces are the namespaces that appear at the root path of your private registry. For example, if your registry is hosted at myregistry.com:5000, then mynamespace in myregistry.com:5000/mynamespace is defined as a top-level namespace. There can be many top-level namespaces.

When the images are mirrored to your private registry, it is required that the top-level namespace where images are getting mirrored already exists or can be automatically created during the image push. If your registry does not allow automatic creation of top-level namespaces, you must create them manually.

When you generate mirror manifests, you can specify the top-level namespace where you want to mirror the images by setting TARGET_REGISTRY to myregistry.com:5000/mynamespace which has the benefit of needing to create only one namespace mynamespace in your registry if it does not allow automatic creation of namespaces. The top-level namespaces can also be provided in the final registry by using --final-registry.

If you do not specify your own top-level namespace, the mirroring process will use the ones that are specified by the CASEs. For example, it will try to mirror the images at myregistry.com:5000/cp, myregistry.com:5000/cpopen etc.

So if your registry does not allow automatic creation of top-level namespaces and you are not going to use your own during generation of mirror manifests, then you must create the following namespaces at the root of your registry.

There can be more top-level namespaces that you might need to create. See section on Generate mirror manifests for information on how to use the oc ibm-pak describe command to list all the top-level namespaces.

Set environment variables and download CASE files

If your host must connect to the internet via a proxy, you must set environment variables on the machine that accesses the internet via the proxy server.

If you are mirroring via connected mirroring, set the following environment variables on the machine that accesses the internet via the proxy server:

export https_proxy=http://proxy-server-hostname:port
export http_proxy=http://proxy-server-hostname:port

# Example:
export https_proxy=http://server.proxy.xyz.com:5018
export http_proxy=http://server.proxy.xyz.com:5018

Before mirroring your images, you can set the environment variables on your mirroring device, and connect to the internet so that you can download the corresponding CASE files. To finish preparing your host, complete the following steps:

Note: Save a copy of your environment variable values to a text editor. You can use that file as a reference to cut and paste from when you finish mirroring images to your registry.

  1. Create the following environment variables with the installer image name and the version.

    export CASE_NAME=<YOUR_CASE_NAME>
export CASE_VERSION=<YOUR_CASE_VERSION>

    To find the CASE name and version, see IBM: Product CASE to Application Version.

  2. Connect your host to the intranet.

  3. The plug-in can detect the locale of your environment and provide textual helps and messages accordingly. You can optionally set the locale by running the following command:

    oc ibm-pak config locale -l LOCALE

    Where LOCALE can be one of de_DE, en_US, es_ES, fr_FR, it_IT, ja_JP, ko_KR, pt_BR, zh_Hans, zh_Hant.

  4. Configure the plug-in to download CASEs as OCI artifacts from IBM Cloud Container Registry (ICCR).

    oc ibm-pak config repo 'IBM Cloud-Pak OCI registry' -r oci:cp.icr.io/cpopen --enable

  5. Enable color output (optional with v1.4.0 and later)

    oc ibm-pak config color --enable true

  6. Download the image inventory for your IBM Cloud Pak to your host.

    Tip: If you do not specify the CASE version, it downloads the latest CASE.

    oc ibm-pak get \
$CASE_NAME \
--version $CASE_VERSION

By default, the root directory that is used by plug-in is ~/.ibm-pak. This means that the preceding command will download the CASE under ~/.ibm-pak/data/cases/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION. You can configure this root directory by setting the IBMPAK_HOME environment variable. Assuming IBMPAK_HOME is set, the preceding command will download the CASE under $IBMPAK_HOME/.ibm-pak/data/cases/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION.

If the download fails, you can try to increase the default values of the HTTP timeout and maximum HTTP retry attempts as required in the IBMPAK_HTTP_TIMEOUT and IBMPAK_HTTP_RETRY flags.

The logs files will be available at $IBMPAK_HOME/.ibm-pak/logs/oc-ibm_pak.log.

Your host is now configured and you are ready to mirror your images.

Notes:

Mirroring images to your private container registry

The process of mirroring images takes the image from the internet to your host, then effectively copies that image to your private container registry. After you mirror your images, you can configure your cluster and complete air-gapped installation.

Complete the following steps to mirror your images from your host to your private container registry:

1. Generate mirror manifests

Notes:

You can also generate manifests to mirror images to an intermediate registry server, then mirroring to a final registry server. This is done by passing the final registry server as an argument to --final-registry:

   oc ibm-pak generate mirror-manifests \
      $CASE_NAME \
      $INTERMEDIATE_REGISTRY \
      --version $CASE_VERSION
      --final-registry $FINAL_REGISTRY

In this case, in place of a single mapping file (images-mapping.txt), two mapping files are created.

  1. images-mapping-to-registry.txt
  2. images-mapping-from-registry.txt

  1. Run the following commands to generate mirror manifests to be used when mirroring from a file system (disconnected mirroring):

    oc ibm-pak generate mirror-manifests \
   $CASE_NAME \
   file://local \
   --final-registry $TARGET_REGISTRY

    Example ~/.ibm-pak directory structure for disconnected mirroring

    The following tree shows an example of the ~/.ibm-pak directory structure for disconnected mirroring:

    tree ~/.ibm-pak
/root/.ibm-pak
├── config
│   └── config.yaml
├── data
│   ├── cases
│   │   └── ibm-cp-common-services
│   │       └── 1.9.0
│   │           ├── XXXX
│   │           ├── XXXX
│   └── mirror
│       └── ibm-cp-common-services
│           └── 1.9.0
│               ├── catalog-sources.yaml
│               ├── image-content-source-policy.yaml
│               ├── image-digest-mirror-set.yaml
│               ├── images-mapping-to-filesystem.txt
│               └── images-mapping-from-filesystem.txt
└── logs
   └── oc-ibm_pak.log

    Note: A new directory ~/.ibm-pak/mirror is created when you run the oc ibm-pak generate mirror-manifests command. This directory holds the image-content-source-policy.yaml, image-digest-mirror-set.yaml, images-mapping-to-filesystem.txt, images-mapping-from-filesystem.txt, and catalog-sources.yaml files.

Tip: Some products support the ability to generate mirror manifests only for a subset of images by using the --filter argument and image grouping. The --filter argument provides the ability to customize which images are mirrored during an air-gapped installation. As an example for this function, ibm-cloud-native-postgresql CASE can be used, which contains groups that allow mirroring-specific variant of ibm-cloud-native-postgresql (Standard or Enterprise). Use the --filter argument to target a variant of ibm-cloud-native-postgresql to mirror rather than the entire library. The filtering can be applied for groups and architectures. Consider the following command:

   oc ibm-pak generate mirror-manifests \
      ibm-cloud-native-postgresql \
      file://local \
      --final-registry $TARGET_REGISTRY \
      --filter $GROUPS

The command was updated with a --filter argument. For example, for $GROUPS equal to ibmEdbStandard the mirror manifests will be generated only for the images associated with ibm-cloud-native-postgresql in its Standard variant. The resulting image group consists of images in the ibm-cloud-native-postgresql image group in addition to any images that are not associated with any groups. This allows products to include common images and the ability to reduce the number of images that you need to mirror.

Starting from v1.9.0, you can use path compression to install IBM Cloud Paks into target registries with a restricted repository hierarchy. For more information about using path compression, see Generating mirror manifests with compressed registry paths and sharding.

Note: You can use the following command to list all the images that will be mirrored and the publicly accessible registries from where those images will be pulled from:

   oc ibm-pak describe $CASE_NAME --version $CASE_VERSION --list-mirror-images

Tip: The output of the preceding command will have two sections:

  1. Mirroring Details from Source to Target Registry

  2. Mirroring Details from Target to Final Registry. A connected mirroring path that does not involve an intermediate registry will only have the first section.

    Note down the Registries found sub sections in the preceding command output. You will need to authenticate against those registries so that the images can be pulled and mirrored to your local registry. See the next steps on authentication. The Top level namespaces found section shows the list of namespaces under which the images will be mirrored. These namespaces should be created manually in your registry (which appears in the Destination column in the above command output) root path if your registry does not allow automatic creation of namespaces.

2. Authenticating the registry

Complete the following steps to authenticate your registries:

  1. Store authentication credentials for all source Docker registries.

    Your product might require one or more authenticated registries. The following registries require authentication:

    • cp.icr.io
    • registry.redhat.io
    • registry.access.redhat.com

    You must run the following command to configure credentials for all target registries that require authentication. Run the command separately for each registry:

    Note: The export REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE command only needs to run once.

    export REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE=<path to the file which will store the auth credentials generated on podman login>
podman login <TARGET_REGISTRY>

    Important: When you log in to cp.icr.io, you must specify the user as cp and the password, which is your Entitlement key from the IBM Cloud Container Registry. For example,:

    podman login cp.icr.io
Username: cp
Password:
Login Succeeded!

For example, if you export REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE=~/.ibm-pak/auth.json, then after performing podman login, you can see that the file is populated with registry credentials.

If you use docker login, the authentication file is typically located at $HOME/.docker/config.json on Linux or %USERPROFILE%/.docker/config.json on Windows. After docker login you should export REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE to point to that location. For example, in Linux you can issue the following command:

export REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE=$HOME/.docker/config.json
Table 2. Directory description
Directory Description
~/.ibm-pak/config Stores the default configuration of the plug-in and has information about the public GitHub URL from where the cases are downloaded.
~/.ibm-pak/data/cases This directory stores the CASE files when they are downloaded by issuing the oc ibm-pak get command.
~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror This directory stores the image-mapping files: ImageDigestMirrorSet manifest in image-digest-mirror-set.yaml, ImageContentSourcePolicy manifest in image-content-source-policy.yaml and CatalogSource manifests in one or more catalog-sourcesXXX.yaml files. The files images-mapping-to-filesystem.txt and images-mapping-from-filesystem.txt are inputs to the oc image mirror command, which copies the images to the file system and from the file system to the registry respectively.
~/.ibm-pak/data/logs This directory contains the oc-ibm_pak.log file, which captures all the logs that are generated by the plug-in.

3. Mirror images to final location

Complete the steps in this section on your host that is connected to both the local Docker registry and the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform cluster.

  1. Mirror images to the final location.

    • For mirroring from a bastion host (connected mirroring):

      Mirror images to the TARGET_REGISTRY:

       oc image mirror \
   -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping.txt \
   --filter-by-os '.*'  \
   -a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
   --insecure  \
   --skip-multiple-scopes \
   --max-per-registry=1

      If you generated manifests in the previous steps to mirror images to an intermediate registry server followed by a final registry server, run the following commands:

      1. Mirror images to the intermediate registry server:

        oc image mirror \
  -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping-to-registry.txt \
  --filter-by-os '.*'  \
  -a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
  --insecure  \
  --skip-multiple-scopes \
  --max-per-registry=1

      2. Mirror images from the intermediate registry server to the final registry server:

        oc image mirror \
  -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping-from-registry.txt \
  --filter-by-os '.*'  \
  -a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
  --insecure  \
  --skip-multiple-scopes \
  --max-per-registry=1

        The oc image mirror --help command can be run to see all the options available on the mirror command. 

        oc image mirror --help

        Note: Sometimes based on the number and size of images to be mirrored, the oc image mirror might take longer. If you are issuing the command on a remote machine, it is recommended that you run the command in the background with a nohup so even if network connection to your remote machine is lost or you close the terminal, the mirroring will continue. For example, the below command will start the mirroring process in background and write the log to my-mirror-progress.txt.

        nohup oc image mirror \
-f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping.txt \
-a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
--filter-by-os '.*' \
--insecure \
--skip-multiple-scopes \
--max-per-registry=1 > my-mirror-progress.txt  2>&1 &

        You can view the progress of the mirror by issuing the following command on the remote machine:

        tail -f my-mirror-progress.txt

        If you are on an unreliable network, follow the steps in Preparing for unreliable network.

    • For mirroring from a file system (disconnected mirroring):

      Mirror images to your file system:

       export IMAGE_PATH=<image-path>
 oc image mirror \
   -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping-to-filesystem.txt \
   --filter-by-os '.*'  \
   -a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
   --insecure  \
   --skip-multiple-scopes \
   --max-per-registry=1 \
   --dir "$IMAGE_PATH"

      The <image-path> refers to the local path to store the images. For example, in the previous section if provided file://local as input during generate mirror-manifests, then the preceding command will create a subdirectory v2/local inside directory that is referred by <image-path> and copy the images under it.

    The following command can be used to see all the options available on the mirror command. 

    oc image mirror --help

    Note: Sometimes based on the number and size of images to be mirrored, the oc image mirror might take longer. If you are issuing the command on a remote machine, it is recommended that you run the command in the background with nohup so that even if you lose network connection to your remote machine or you close the terminal, the mirroring will continue. For example, the following command will start the mirroring process in the background and write the log to my-mirror-progress.txt.

     export IMAGE_PATH=<image-path>
 nohup oc image mirror \
   -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping-to-filesystem.txt \
   --filter-by-os '.*' \
   -a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
   --insecure \
   --skip-multiple-scopes \
   --max-per-registry=1 \
   --dir "$IMAGE_PATH" > my-mirror-progress.txt  2>&1 &

    You can view the progress of the mirror by issuing the following command on the remote machine:

    tail -f my-mirror-progress.txt

    If you are on an unreliable network, follow the steps in Preparing for unreliable network.

  2. For disconnected mirroring only: Continue to move the following items to your file system:

    • The <image-path> directory that you specified in the previous step
    • The auth file referred by $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE
    • ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping-from-filesystem.txt

  3. For disconnected mirroring only: Mirror images to the target registry from file system

    Complete the steps in this section on your file system to copy the images from the file system to the $TARGET_REGISTRY. Your file system must be connected to the target docker registry.

    Important: If you used the placeholder value of TARGET_REGISTRY as a parameter to --final-registry at the time of generating mirror manifests, then before running the following command, find and replace the placeholder value of TARGET_REGISTRY in the file, images-mapping-from-filesystem.txt, with the actual registry where you want to mirror the images. For example, if you want to mirror images to myregistry.com/mynamespace then replace TARGET_REGISTRY with myregistry.com/mynamespace.

    1. Run the following command to copy the images (referred in the images-mapping-from-filesystem.txt file) from the directory referred by <image-path> to the final target registry:

      export IMAGE_PATH=<image-path>
oc image mirror \
  -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping-from-filesystem.txt \
  -a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
  --from-dir "$IMAGE_PATH" \
  --filter-by-os '.*' \
  --insecure \
  --skip-multiple-scopes \
  --max-per-registry=1

Preparing for unreliable network

If you are on a slow, unreliable network where connections drop frequently, you can choose either of the following options:

  1. Run oc image mirror command in a while loop. If the mirroring fails due to any reason it will start all over again after pausing for a while(5 seconds in the below example).
    while ! oc image mirror <args>; do sleep 5; done;
  2. You can passcontinue-on-error flag to oc image mirror command, set to true (--continue-on-error=true). This flag indicates that the command will try to mirror as much as possible and continue on errors like network issues etc. Please note that usage of this flag might cause misleading errors. For more information, see Communication issue due to too many requests error (HTTP 429) while image mirroring.

4. Configure the cluster

  1. Update the global image pull secret for your Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Follow the steps in Updating the global cluster pull secret.

    The documented steps in the link enable your cluster to have proper authentication credentials in place to pull images from your TARGET_REGISTRY as specified in the image-digest-mirror-set.yaml (or in the image-content-source-policy.yaml) which you will apply to your cluster in the next step.

  2. Apply either the ImageDigestMirrorSet or ImageContentSourcePolicy manifests to your cluster. Note that the ImageContentSourcePolicy API is deprecated since Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.13.

    Important:

    • Before you run the command in this step, you must be logged in to your OpenShift cluster. Using the oc login command, log in to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster where your final location resides. You can identify your specific oc login by clicking the user drop-down menu in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform console, then clicking Copy Login Command.

      • If you used the placeholder value of TARGET_REGISTRY as a parameter to --final-registry at the time of generating mirror manifests, then before running the following command, find and replace the placeholder value of TARGET_REGISTRY in file, ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/image-digest-mirror-set.yaml (or ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/image-content-source-policy.yaml) with the actual registry where you want to mirror the images. For example, replace TARGET_REGISTRY with myregistry.com/mynamespace.

    Run the following command to create ImageDigestMirrorSet:

       oc apply -f  ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/image-digest-mirror-set.yaml

    Run the following command to create ImageContentSourcePolicy (note that ICSP is deprecated since Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.13):

       oc apply -f  ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/image-content-source-policy.yaml

    If you are using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 4.7 or earlier, this step might cause your cluster nodes to drain and restart sequentially to apply the configuration changes.

  3. Verify that the ImageDigestMirrorSet or ImageContentSourcePolicy has been applied.

    oc get imageDigestMirrorSet

    Verify that the ImageContentSourcePolicy is created (note that ICSP is deprecated since Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.13):

    oc get imageContentSourcePolicy

  1. Verify your cluster node status and wait for all the nodes to be restarted before proceeding.

    oc get MachineConfigPool

    $ oc get MachineConfigPool -w
NAME     CONFIG                                             UPDATED   UPDATING   DEGRADED   MACHINECOUNT   READYMACHINECOUNT   UPDATEDMACHINECOUNT   DEGRADEDMACHINECOUNT   AGE
master   rendered-master-53bda7041038b8007b038c08014626dc   True      False      False      3              3                   3                     0                      10d
worker   rendered-worker-b54afa4063414a9038958c766e8109f7   True      False      False      3              3                   3                     0                      10d

    After the ImageDigestMirrorSet (or ImageContentsourcePolicy) and global image pull secret are applied, the configuration of your nodes will be updated sequentially. Wait until all MachineConfigPools are in the UPDATED=True status before proceeding.

  2. Create a new project for the CASE commands by running the following commands:

    Note: You must be logged in to a cluster before performing the following steps.

    export NAMESPACE=<YOUR_NAMESPACE>

    oc new-project $NAMESPACE

  3. Optional: If you use an insecure registry, you must add the target registry to the cluster insecureRegistries list.

    oc patch image.config.openshift.io/cluster --type=merge \
-p '{"spec":{"registrySources":{"insecureRegistries":["'${TARGET_REGISTRY}'"]}}}'

  4. Verify your cluster node status and wait for all the nodes to be restarted before proceeding.

    oc get MachineConfigPool -w

    After the ImageDigestMirrorSet (or ImageContentSourcePolicy) and global image pull secret are applied, the configuration of your nodes will be updated sequentially. Wait until all MachineConfigPools are updated.

5. Install IBM Cloud® Paks by way of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Now that your images are mirrored to your air-gapped environment, you can deploy your IBM Cloud® Paks to that environment. When you mirrored your environment, you created a parallel offline version of everything that you needed to install an operator into Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform. To install your IBM Cloud® Paks, complete the following steps:

5.1. Create the catalog source and install the IBM Cloud Pak

Important: Before you run any of the oc ibm-pak launch \ command, you must be logged in to your cluster. Using the oc login command, log in to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster where your final location resides. You can identify your specific oc login by clicking the user drop-down menu in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform console, then clicking Copy Login Command.

  1. Set the namespace to install the IBM Cloud Pak catalog:

    export NAMESPACE=<YOUR_NAMESPACE>

  2. Set the environment variable of the --inventory parameter:

    export CASE_INVENTORY_SETUP=<YOUR_CASE_INVENTORY_SETUP>

  3. Create and configure a catalog source.

    The recommended way to install the catalog is to run the following command:

       oc apply -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/catalog-sources.yaml

    The following command can also be used to install the catalog:

       oc ibm-pak launch \
   $CASE_NAME \
     --version $CASE_VERSION \
     --action install-catalog \
     --inventory $CASE_INVENTORY_SETUP \
     --namespace $NAMESPACE \
     --args "--registry $TARGET_REGISTRY --recursive \
     --inputDir ~/.ibm-pak/data/cases/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION"

    Note: In foundational services version 3.13 and previous versions, the install-catalog command will deploy catalogsource with the latest tag. Starting from foundational services version 3.14, install-catalog deploys the catalog source,opencloud-operators, with catalogsource image digest.

  4. Verify that the CatalogSource for your IBM Cloud Pak operator is created.

    oc get pods -n openshift-marketplace
oc get catalogsource -n openshift-marketplace

  5. Install your IBM Cloud Pak operators.

    Note: You must have cluster admin access to run the install-operator command. However, you do not need cluster admin access for mirroring.

    oc ibm-pak launch \
   $CASE_NAME \
   --version $CASE_VERSION \
   --inventory $CASE_INVENTORY_SETUP \
   --action install-operator \
   --namespace $NAMESPACE

  6. Using the oc login command, log in to the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform cluster where your final location resides. You can identify your specific oc login by clicking the user drop-down menu in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform console, then clicking Copy Login Command.

  7. Verify that your IBM Cloud Pak operator is installed:

    oc get pod -n $NAMESPACE

    It might take up to 15 minutes for all the pods to show the Running status.

5.2. Access the console

Use the following command to get the URL to access the console:

oc get route -n $NAMESPACE cp-console -o jsonpath=‘{.spec.host}’

The preceding command returns the following output:

cp-console.apps.mycluster.mydomain.com

Based on the example output, your console URL would be https://cp-console.apps.mycluster.mydomain.com.

5.3. Retrieve your console username and password

The default username to access the console is admin.

You can get the password for the admin username by running the following command:

oc -n $NAMESPACE get secret platform-auth-idp-credentials -o jsonpath='{.data.admin_password}' | base64 -d

The following password is an example of the output of the preceding command:

EwK9dj9fwPZHyHTyu9TyIgh9klZSzVsA

Based on the example output, you would then use EwK9dj9fwPZHyHTyu9TyIgh9klZSzVsA as the password.

You have now successfully created and deployed your IBM Cloud Pak environment by using a private container registry.

Setting up a repeatable mirroring process

Once you complete a CASE save, you can mirror the CASE as many times as you want to. This approach allows you to mirror a specific version of the IBM Cloud Pak into development, test, and production stages by using a private container registry.

Follow the steps in this section if you want to save the CASE to multiple registries (per environment) once and be able to run the CASE in the future without repeating the CASE save process.

  1. Run the following command to save the CASE to ~/.ibm-pak/data/cases/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION which can be used as an input during the mirror manifest generation:

    oc ibm-pak get \
$CASE_NAME \
--version $CASE_VERSION

  2. Run the oc ibm-pak generate mirror-manifests command to generate the image-mapping.txt:

    oc ibm-pak generate mirror-manifests \
$CASE_NAME \
$TARGET_REGISTRY \
--version $CASE_VERSION

    Note: If you are using a Red Hat® Quay.io registry and need to mirror images to a specific organization in the registry, you can target that organization by specifying:

       export ORGANIZATION=<your-organization>
   oc ibm-pak generate mirror-manifests
   $CASE_NAME
   $TARGET_REGISTRY/$ORGANIZATION
   --version $CASE_VERSION

    Then, add the image-mapping.txt to the oc image mirror command:

    oc image mirror \
  -f ~/.ibm-pak/data/mirror/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION/images-mapping.txt \
  --filter-by-os '.*'  \
  -a $REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE \
  --insecure  \
  --skip-multiple-scopes \
  --max-per-registry=1

If you want to make this repeatable across environments, you can reuse the same saved CASE cache (~/.ibm-pak/$CASE_NAME/$CASE_VERSION) instead of executing a CASE save again in other environments. You do not have to worry about updated versions of dependencies being brought into the saved cache.