Red Hat: OpenShell + Podman + Fedora/RHEL  Vertex AI Anthropic Quickstart

Red Hat has released a new integration enabling developers to run Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenCode AI coding assistants locally using OpenShell, Podman, and Fedora or RHEL systems with Vertex AI backend support. The setup allows users to create a local sandbox environment that connects to Google's Vertex AI for inference, bypassing the need for direct Anthropic API keys. Developers can install the necessary packages via COPR, configure the OpenShell gateway, and launch the AI assistants with environment variables pointing to the local inference endpoint.

install $ sudo dnf copr enable maxamillion/nvidia-openshell $ sudo dnf install openshell-gateway openshell start the rootless user systemd service unit $ systemctl --user start openshell-gateway.service add the local openshell gateway to your client config $ openshell gateway add https://localhost:17670 --local Follow the Vertex AI Claude Code instructions to setup your gcloud creds https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eNARy9CI28o09E7Foq01e5WD5MvEj3LSBnXqFcprxjo/edit?tab=t.0 heading=h.8ldy5by9bpo8 MAKE SURE TO GET YOUR PROJECT NAME, YOU'LL NEED IT IN THE FOLLOWING EXPORT $ export vertex project="MY ORGS GCLOUD PROJECT" Enable the providers v2 feature flag this is necessary for now, but will go away when we migrate from v1 to v2 upstream $ openshell settings set --global --key providers v2 enabled --value true --yes Create the provider credential in OpenShell $ openshell provider create --name vertex-local --type google-vertex-ai --from-gcloud-adc --config VERTEX AI PROJECT ID="${vertex project}" --config VERTEX AI REGION=global Set the inference provider NOTE: the model is ignored by claude code, but openshell requires the setting $ openshell inference set --provider vertex-local --model claude-sonnet-4-6 Create a sandbox using this provider credential $ openshell sandbox create --name my-sandbox --provider vertex-local Once inside the sandbox, either run Claude Code or OpenCode as follows: Claude Code $ ANTHROPIC BASE URL="https://inference.local" ANTHROPIC API KEY=unused claude --bare OpenCode $ ANTHROPIC BASE URL="https://inference.local/v1" ANTHROPIC API KEY=unused opencode