Running Openshift with Zsh

The container spun up fast, but the shell felt heavy. Openshift was running, yet every command took too long. That is when Zsh changed everything.

Openshift with Zsh is more than a quality-of-life upgrade. It is a direct improvement to speed, clarity, and control inside your pods. Bash works. Zsh works better. Its completion system understands Kubernetes resources, its prompt can show current project and namespace, and its history search is lightning quick.

The setup is straightforward. Install Zsh in your container image, then configure it in your Openshift Deployment or StatefulSet. Use a .zshrc tuned for developers: enable autocd, set powerful aliases (ocp for oc get pods), and load plugins like zsh-completions for oc commands. This gives interactive shells inside oc exec sessions smarter autocomplete and syntax highlighting.

Persistent storage for /root/.zsh_history is worth adding to keep command recall between deployments. For remote debugging, combine Zsh with kubectl exec or oc rsh into Openshift pods to gain a stable, predictable environment. Engineers who live in terminals will notice fewer context switches and zero friction with command syntax.

Integrating Openshift Zsh into CI/CD workflows lets jobs run reproducibly in interactive shells without rewriting scripts. It also simplifies onboarding—new contributors can start an Openshift Zsh pod and get the same tuned interface on day one.

If you run clusters at scale, standardizing on Zsh across images means ops and devs share the same shell behavior. This lowers errors caused by different environments and makes debugging faster.

Test it yourself. Build a lean container image:

FROM registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi
RUN yum install -y zsh && chsh -s /bin/zsh
COPY .zshrc /root/.zshrc

Deploy to Openshift, exec into the pod, and feel the difference.

Stop wasting seconds on every command. Start running Openshift with Zsh. Visit hoop.dev and see it live in minutes.