OpenShift server adapter is a great tool that allows developers to synchronize local changes in the Eclipse workspace with running pods in the OpenShift cluster. It also allows you to remote debug those pods when the server adapter is launched in Debug mode. The supported stacks are Java and NodeJS.

As pods are ephemeral OpenShift resources, the server adapter definition was based on an OpenShift service resource and the pods are then dynamically computed from the service selector.

This has a major drawback as it allows to use this feature only for pods that are part of a service, which may be logical for Web based applications as a route (and thus a service) is required in order to access the application.

So, it is now possible to create a server adapter from the following OpenShift resources:

If a server adapter is created from a pod, it will be created from the associated OpenShift resource, in the preferred order:

As the OpenShift explorer used to display OpenShift resources that were linked to a service, it has been enhanced as well. It now displays resources linked to a deployment config or replication controller. Here is an example of a deployment with no service ie a deployment config:

So, as an OpenShift server adapter can be created from different kind of resources, the kind of associated resource is displayed when creating the OpenShift server adapter:

Once created, the kind of OpenShift resource adapter is also displayed in the Servers view:

This information is also available from the server editor:

The CDK 3 server adapter has been here for quite a long time. It used to be Tech Preview as CDK 3 was not officially released. It is now officiallly available. While the server adapter itself has limited functionality, it is able to start and stop the CDK virtual machine via its minishift binary. Simply hit Ctrl+3 (Cmd+3 on OSX) and type CDK, that will bring up a command to setup and/or launch the CDK server adapter. You should see the old CDK 2 server adapter along with the new CDK 3 one (labeled Red Hat Container Development Kit 3).

All you have to do is set the credentials for your Red Hat account and the location of the CDK’s minishift binary file and the type of virtualization hypervisor.

Once you’re finished, a new CDK Server adapter will then be created and visible in the Servers view.

Once the server is started, Docker and OpenShift connections should appear in their respective views, allowing the user to quickly create a new Openshift application and begin developing their AwesomeApp in a highly-replicatable environment.

OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) 3.5 has been announced by Red Hat. JBossTools 4.4.4.Final has been validated against OCP 3.5.

The OpenShift server adapter had long support for EAP/Wildfly and NodeJS based deployments. It turns out that it does a great deal of synchronizing local workspace changes to remote deployments on OpenShift which have been standardized through images metadata (labels). But each runtime has its own specific. As an example, Wildfly/EAP deployments requires that a re-deploy trigger is sent after the files have been synchronized.

In order to reduce the technical debt and allow support for other runtimes (lots of them in the microservice world), we have refactored the OpenShift server adapter so that each runtime specific is now isolated and that it will be easy and safe to add support for new runtime.

For a full in-depth description, see the following wiki page.

Pipeline based builds are now supported by the OpenShift tooling. When creating an application, if using a template, if one of the builds is based on pipeline, you can view the detail of the pipeline:

When your application is deployed, you can see the details of the build configuration for the pipeline based builds:

More to come as we are improving the pipeline support in the OpenShift tooling.