Prerequisites

Before you install IBM RPA on an air-gapped environment, you must set up a host that can be connected to the internet to complete configuring your mirroring environment. No matter what medium you choose for your air-gapped installation, you must satisfy the following prerequisites:

  • Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform requires you to have cluster admin access to run the install-operator command.

  • An Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform cluster must be installed.

  • An image registry that is accessible both from the bastion host and the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform cluster.

    Note:If you don't already have a registry, see Configure a local image registry for steps on how to create and configure one.
  • Access to the following sites and ports:
    • *.docker.io and *.docker.com: For more information about specific sites to allow access to, see Docker Hub Hosts for Firewalls and HTTP Proxy Servers 🡥
    • icr.io:443 for IBM Entitled Registry and IBM RPA catalog source
    • quay.io:443 for IBM RPA catalog and images
    • github.com for CASEs and tools
    • redhat.com for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform upgrades

If you want to use your own image registry, create the following namespaces to store the IBM RPA images:

  • The cp namespace, for images from cp.icr.io/cp. You need an entitlement key and credentials to pull images from the IBM Entitled Registry. The namespace must have a user who can write and create repositories, and read all repositories.
  • The ibmcom namespace, for IBM images from docker.io. You need a Docker Hub user ID and API key to avoid rate limiting when pulling these images from docker.io.
  • The cpopen namespace, for images from the icr.io/cpopen repository. The cpopen namespace is for publicly available images that are hosted by IBM that do not require credentials to pull.
  • The opencloudio namespace, for images from quay.io/opencloudio. The opencloudio namespace is for select IBM open source component images that are available on quay.io. The IBM Cloud® Platform Common Services images are hosted on opencloudio.

Prepare your host

You also need a bastion host that can access the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform cluster, an internal image registry, and the internet. The bastion host must be on a Linux® x86_64 platform with any operating system that is supported by the IBM Cloud Pak® CLI and the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform CLI.

A bastion host is a server that is provisioned with a public IP address that is accessible through remote access Secure Shell (SSH). When configured, the bastion server acts as an intermediate server with a secure connection to the instances made available without a public IP address. For more information, see Create a bastion host 🡥.

Install the following tools on the bastion host:

  1. Install the oc Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform CLI tool.
  2. Install the IBM Cloud Pak® CLI. Go to the cloud-pak cli release page 🡥 and identify latest release of the binary file for your platform.

Installing the IBM Cloud Pak® CLI

Run the following steps to install the IBM Cloud Pak® CLI:

  1. Install the IBM Cloud Pak® CLI following the instructions in the official repository 🡥.

  2. Confirm that the cloudctl is installed by running the following command. This should display the cloudctl usage information if installed correctly:

    cloudctl --help

  3. Create a directory that serves as the offline store. The following example directory is used in the subsequent steps:

    mkdir $HOME/offline

What to do next

See Configuring your environment to proceed.