Web Terminal Operator

The Web Terminal Operator provides users with the ability to create a terminal instance embedded in the OpenShift Console.

Note: The OpenShift console integration that allows easily creating web terminal instances and logging in automatically is available in OpenShift 4.5.3 and higher. In previous versions of OpenShift, the operator can be installed but web terminals will have to be created and accessed manually.

Where to report bugs or propose features?

If you face any issues with installing the Web Terminal Operator or using it, have any ideas about what could be done better, please let us know by creating a jira issue at https://issues.redhat.com/browse/WTO

Configuring the containers used for Web Terminals

Upon startup, the Web Terminal Operator creates two DevWorkspaceTemplate custom resources in its installed namespace, named web-terminal-tooling and web-terminal-exec. These templates are referenced by Web Terminals in the cluster, and define the images used to run the DevWorkspaceTemplate:

• web-terminal-tooling defines the container that contains CLI tooling (e.g. kubectl, oc, etc.) and is where the shell will be opened when creating a web terminal.
• web-terminal-exec is a sidecar container that allows the OpenShift cluster to communicate with the Web Terminal, allowing for the requesting user to be automatically logged into the cluster, etc.

To customize Web Terminal Operator functionality, these DevWorkspaceTemplates can be modified, and these changes will be propagated to all Web Terminals on the cluster the next time that terminal is started. To change the image used for the tooling container, for example, it's sufficient to edit the image field in the web-terminal-tooling DevWorkspaceTemplate on the cluster.

By default, the Web Terminal Operator will overwrite any modifications to its DevWorkspaceTemplates when it starts. In order to persist custom changes between Web Terminal Operator versions, the Kubernetes annotation

web-terminal.redhat.com/unmanaged-state: "true"

should be added to the DevWorkspaceTemplate. Note that if this annotation is used, the Web Terminal Operator will not automatically update the CLI tools used in the tooling image; it is recommended to remove the annotation when upgrading the Web Terminal Operator to get the latest changes, and reapply customizations after the upgrade is complete.

Deploying the operator from next images

After every commit in master, the index and bundle images are built and pushed to quay.io/repository/wto/web-terminal-operator-index:next and quay.io/repository/wto/web-terminal-operator-metadata:next

This repo includes a Makefile to simplify deploying the Operator to a cluster:

Makefile rule	Purpose
make install	Register the CatalogSource and install the operator on the cluster.
make register_catalogsource	Register the CatalogSource but do not install the operator. This enables the operator to be installed manually through OperatorHub.
make unregister_catalogsource	Remove the CatalogSource from the cluster.
make uninstall	uninstalls the Web Terminal Operator Subscription and related ClusterServiceVersion
make uninstall_v1_2	Remove the installed WTO 1.2 from the cluster

The commands above require being logged in to the cluster as a cluster-admin. See make help for a full list of supported environment variables and rules available.

Deploying the operator from local sources

In order to deploy the operator from this repo directly, you need to first create the olm bundle and index, push that to a docker registry, and then create a CatalogSource referencing those images.

This can be done in one step using the Makefile:

WTO_IMG=#<your controller image>
BUNDLE_IMG=#<your bundle image>
INDEX_IMG=#<your index image>
make build_controller_image build_install

This will build and push images defined by the environment variables WTO_IMG, BUNDLE_IMG and INDEX_IMG, and register a CatalogSource on the cluster. You may need to set the repos used for the index and bundle to be public to ensure they can be accessed from the cluster.

If you already have the index image pushed to your registry, then you can use the make install or make register_catalogsource rules with the environment variables defined above to install those images on the cluster.

Removing the operator from a cluster

To remove the WebTerminal Operator and the CatalogSource use

make uninstall unregister_catalogsource

Manifests generation

Prereq: The latest compatible operator sdk https://github.com/operator-framework/operator-sdk/releases/tag/v0.17.2

Execute

  make gen_terminal_csv

Related Projects

• The Web Terminal Operator is powered by the devworkspace-operator

Source Syncing

source	destination	sync job
devworkspace-controller	web-terminal	Jenkins job
web-terminal-operator	web-terminal-dev-operator-metadata	Jenkins job