The web console is accessible via any modern web browser. The URL is configurable and is found by using the oc CLI.

[user@host ~]$ oc whoami --show-console
https://console-openshift-console.apps.ocp4.example.com

Use a web browser to navigate to the URL, which displays the authentication page. Using the credentials for your cluster access brings you to the home page for the web console.

Figure 2.1: The OpenShift home page

Within the web console, the primary means of navigation is the sidebar on the left. The sidebar organizes cluster functions and tasks into several major categories. The first selection menu in the sidebar menu switches between the Administrator and the Developer perspectives.

Figure 2.2: OpenShift web console perspective selection

The sidebar menu layout and the features that it displays differ between these two perspectives. The Developer perspective primarily focuses on building and deploying applications. The Administrator perspective focuses on cluster configuration, deployments, and operations of the cluster itself. Many features are available in both perspectives, but differ in interface specifics to better match each of the personas.

The Developer perspective includes many sections that facilitate CI/CD methodology, which centers around automatically building application source code. The details of such automation is relevant to later chapters in this course.

The Developer perspective includes the following sections:

The topology explorer is only in the Developer perspective. This view shows the main development resources within a project and provides a visual and interactive way to explore other resources.

For example, the following image shows the topology view for a project called top-view.

Figure 2.3: OpenShift web console topology view

This project contains two deployment configurations: one for a PostgreSQL database and another for a Node.js application. Because the Node.js deployment configuration has an associated build configuration, there is an indicator for the status of that build.

Figure 2.4: The build status indicator shows that the most recent build succeeded.

In the opposite corner, a link to the application is available. This link appears because the deployment configuration has an associated route resource.

Within the graph, you can click a resource to see quick details about it. The details side panel also includes a Resources tab with information about related resources. This tab also provides quick ways to get to common information, such as build and pod logs.

For example, the following image shows the related pods, builds, and services for the Node.js deployment configuration.

Figure 2.5: Topology view details panel

The Administrator perspective includes more sections, each of which provide sub-sections with more granularity. The upper-level administrator sections include the following:

With many of the sections in both perspectives, you can navigate deeper into the pages to explore various resource types.

For example, the BuildConfigs section in the Administrator perspective is similar to the Builds section in the Developer perspective. Within the Builds tab for that build configuration, you can select an individual Build to view its details. This details page shows information about the individual build, such as completion status, relevant dates, and the type of build. You can use the tabs on the page to explore even more details, such as the YAML definition and the build logs.

Figure 2.6: Build logs for an example Node.js application