Introducing CRC

About CRC

CRC brings a minimal OpenShift Container Platform 4 cluster to your local computer. This runtime provides minimal environments for development and testing purposes. CRC is mainly targeted at running on developers' desktops. For other OpenShift Container Platform use cases, such as headless or multi-developer setups, use the full OpenShift installer.

See the OpenShift Container Platform documentation for a full introduction to OpenShift Container Platform.

CRC includes the crc command-line interface (CLI) to interact with the CRC instance using the desired container runtime.

Differences from a production OpenShift Container Platform installation

The OpenShift preset for CRC provides a regular OpenShift Container Platform installation with the following notable differences:

The OpenShift Container Platform cluster is ephemeral and is not intended for production use.
CRC does not have a supported upgrade path to newer OpenShift Container Platform versions. Upgrading the OpenShift Container Platform version might cause issues that are difficult to reproduce.
It uses a single node, which behaves as both a control plane and worker node.
It disables the Cluster Monitoring Operator by default. This disabled Operator causes the corresponding part of the web console to be non-functional.
It disables the following operators:
- Cloud Credential Operator.
- Cluster Autoscaler Operator.
- Cloud Controller Manager Operator.
The OpenShift Container Platform cluster runs in a virtual machine known as an instance. This might cause other differences, particularly with external networking.

The OpenShift Container Platform cluster provided by CRC also includes the following non-customizable cluster settings. These settings should not be modified:

The *.crc.testing domain.
The address range used for internal cluster communication.
- The cluster uses the 172 address range. This can cause issues when, for example, a proxy is run in the same address space.