Getting Started with OpenShift

Chapter 5. Environment and Application Management

Once you have added the application cartridges you need and pushed your code to the cloud, you will hopefully hit the OpenShift URL and find your app just works. Now is the time to throw your hands in the air and do a happy dance; this is the awesomesauce of Platform as a Service. Once you are all danced out, you might realize there are some aspects of your application you would like to explore further or tweak; the next few pages will help with that.

In this chapter, you will learn how to access your application’s container, view its log output, and fiddle with its configuration should the need arise. We will explain how to connect to your application’s gear via SSH, how to view and set OpenShift environment variables, and how to access application logs. We will also show how to make configuration changes to your application server or database and how to use marker files to set options such as hot deployment.

SSH Access

Your application’s remote container, called a gear, can be accessed using the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol in the same way as you access regular machines. To communicate with OpenShift securely, your OpenShift account must first contain an SSH public key belonging to the machine from which you wish to connect. This key is uploaded to OpenShift when you first run the terminal command rhc setup (see Chapter 2 for more on this); you can also add keys manually via the OpenShift Web Console’s Settings section. ...