Skip to content

A note on OCP Versions and Artifacts

The OpenShift team cuts 4 different types of releases, all of them available from the download mirrors. However they differ on naming and location:

  1. Stable: highest quality release and intended for customer use.
  2. Release Candidate: early customer access for staging environments and integration testing.
  3. Dev preview: very early customer access for feature assessment and dev environments.
  4. Nightly: for inter-op and continuous testing.

Some differences:

  • Stable builds are stored under https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v<major>/clients/ocp (for example openshift-v4 or openshift-v5)
  • RC and Development/nightly builds are stored under https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v<major>/clients/ocp-dev-preview
  • Stable and RC builds publish their container images to this quay namespace
  • Development builds publish to this quay namespace, but it is protected and you will need to authenticate using your cloud.redhat.com pull secret.
  • Nightly builds published to openshiftapps.com. Accessible only through DCI.

For more information about the available builds, please reference the OpenShift Release Types documentation for the relevant major stream under https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v<major>/ (for example OpenShift_Release_Types.pdf for v4).

DCI uses component tags (in this case, an OCP build maps to a component in the DCI control server) to identify tags, DCI uses build:ga (or "general availability") for stable builds, build:candidate for RC builds and build:dev for dev preview and build:nightly for nightlies.

Here's a table to summarize the changes in URLs across all versions we have identified (<major> is the OCP major version such as 3, 4, or 5):

Build type DCI Tag OCP Mirror Base URL Quay.io Namespace
Stable build:ga mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v\<major>/clients/ocp quay.io/openshift-release-dev/ocp-release
Candidate build:candidate mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v\<major>/clients/ocp-dev-preview quay.io/openshift-release-dev/ocp-release
Dev build:dev mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v\<major>/clients/ocp-dev-preview quay.io/openshift-release-dev/ocp-release-nightly
Nightly build:nightly openshiftapps.com registry.ci.openshift.org

The DCI OCP agent fetches the release.txt file from the OCP mirror and then parses it to figure out the SHA256 for the image to pull from Quay. This way there is no ambiguity on what image to download.