Red Hat Astronaut 2026: a self-hosted OpenShift and Ansible practice platform

I’m preparing for the OpenShift administration exam (DO280/EX280), and I kept running into the same problem. Red Hat exams are fully hands-on, but most free practice material is either a static PDF or a quiz with no explanations. I wanted something that would run against a real cluster and tell me, objectively, whether the thing I built actually works. So I wrote one and published it: Red Hat Astronaut 2026.

It is an independent practice tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Red Hat. All questions are original material written to the published objectives. None of it is taken from, or claims to reproduce, real exam content.

Repo: github.com/Willey2003/redhat-astronaut-2026

What it is

The platform has four parts:

• Engine. A Python web UI and API (the facilitator) plus a separate grader (the conductor), packaged with Docker Compose. Kubernetes manifests are included if you want to host it in a lab cluster.
• Question banks. Plain YAML, one file per question, with an exam.yaml per bank for duration, pass mark and domain weights. A validator checks every bank, and it runs in CI on every push.
• Curriculum. Six top-level modules, from containers and Linux up to capstones. There are also separate step-by-step tracks for the admin path (five modules) and the developer path (four modules).
• Cluster tooling. Helper scripts for Red Hat OpenShift Local (CRC) and OKD, plus a preflight script that checks CPU, RAM, disk, virtualisation support and the oc client.

The banks

There are 15 study banks with 280 questions, plus a 4-question smoke-test bank. 25 questions are hands-on, all of them in the EX280 and EX288 banks. Everything else is single-answer multiple choice, with an explanation for every question.

A note on the bank IDs. Treat them as labels, not as official exam mappings. Red Hat renames and retires exams regularly, and a few of my labels don’t match the current catalogue. For example, ex432 holds installation material. Check the current objectives on Red Hat’s site and use the “What it covers” column to pick a bank.

Also, real Red Hat exams have no multiple-choice section. The multiple-choice banks here are concept checks to find gaps, not an imitation of the exam format. The hands-on banks are the closer rehearsal.

How grading works

Each hands-on question carries a list of checks. A check is an oc or shell command plus an expectation, such as:

• equals
• contains
• a regex matches
• exit-success
• non-empty

The conductor runs the checks against your cluster and splits the points evenly across them, so a half-finished task earns partial credit. A Route task, for example, checks the host, the target service and the TLS termination type separately. Because the checks look at cluster state rather than at your YAML, any valid way of solving the task passes.

There are three modes:

• Training shows the whole bank untimed, with solutions visible.
• Mastery and Exam are timed and hide answers until grading.

Results include a per-domain score, weakest first.

There are also three written labs:

• SCCs, RBAC and quotas for EX280
• two application labs for EX288

Each lab ends with verification commands you can run yourself.

Running it

You need Docker with Compose. For hands-on work you also need an OpenShift cluster. CRC on a machine with at least 8 GB of RAM is the simplest option, and the helper script asks for your own Red Hat pull secret.

git clone https://github.com/Willey2003/redhat-astronaut-2026.git
cd redhat-astronaut-2026
./ga doctor                    # preflight
./cluster/preflight.sh         # can this host run CRC/OKD?
./ga up                        # build and start the platform

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8903. There is no separate install step: ga up builds the images and starts the stack. To start a timed attempt from the terminal instead, run ./ga exam ex280-admin.

The conductor mounts your ~/.kube read-only and runs oc and kubectl from inside its container. Use a practice cluster only, and make sure its API is reachable from that container. The platform has no login, so keep it bound to localhost unless you are on a private network.

Status

This is v0.1 and it is not finished. Most banks are knowledge-only, and the roadmap lists what is planned but not built yet:

• setup steps that reset a task’s starting state before each attempt
• multi-answer questions
• a grading backend that talks to the OpenShift API instead of a shell
• progress tracking

Get it

• Repo: github.com/Willey2003/redhat-astronaut-2026
• Licence: Apache-2.0
• Independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Red Hat. Product and certification names are trademarks of their owners.

If you’re working towards an OpenShift certification and want to add hands-on tasks for another bank, pull requests are welcome. The question format is documented in docs/bank-spec.md.