Running Photon on Fusion via Vagrant

 Published on 21 Apr 2015 ·  Filed in Tutorial ·  499 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)

Most of you have probably picked up on the news of VMware’s new container-optimized Linux distribution, code-named “Photon”. (More details here.) In this post, I’m going to provide a very quick walkthrough on running Photon on VMware Fusion via Vagrant. This walkthrough will leverage a Vagrant box for Photon that has already been created.

To make things easier, I’ve added a photon directory to my GitHub “learning-tools” repository. Feel free to pull those files down to make it easier to follow along.

I assume that you’ve already installed Vagrant, VMware Fusion, and the Vagrant plugin for VMware. If you haven’t, you’ll want to complete those tasks—and verify that everything is working as expected—before proceeding.

1. Install an additional Vagrant plugin that enables Vagrant to better detect and interact with Photon using this command:

    vagrant plugin install vagrant-guests-photon
   

   If you don’t install this plugin, you’ll likely get a non-fatal error about Vagrant being unable to perform the networking configuration. (Review the GitHub repository for this plugin if you want/need more details. Also, note that a PR against Vagrant to eliminate the need for this plugin was opened and merged; this fix should show up in a future release of Vagrant.)

2. Optionally, go ahead and pull down a Vagrant box for Photon using this command:

    vagrant box add vmware/photon
   

   If you decide not to pull down the box ahead of time, Vagrant will fetch the box the first time you run vagrant up. (I prefer to pull the box down ahead of time so that I have it in the event I’m offline when I run vagrant up, but your mileage may vary.)

3. Pull down the files from the photon directory in my GitHub “learning-tools” repository. You can clone the entire repository (using git clone), fork it and clone it, download a ZIP file of the entire repository, or just download the specific files you need.

4. Open a terminal window and change to the directory where the files from step 3 are found, then run vagrant up. If this is the first time you’re running vagrant up after installing the plugin from step 1, you’ll be prompted to enter your administrative credentials so that Vagrant can operate as expected.

5. Vagrant will clone the box, start up the VM, and configure it as specified in the Vagrantfile. Once the VM is up and running, just run vagrant ssh to log into the box as the “vagrant” user.

6. Note that both rkt (CoreOS container runtime) and Docker are pre-installed on Photon. You can run rkt version and docker --version to see the version numbers of each container runtime.

Because the Vagrantfile from my repository leverages an external YAML file for VM details, you can easily spin up more Photon instances—or change the RAM or vCPU configuration—by simply destroying the current environment (vagrant destroy), editing the YAML file, and re-creating the environment (vagrant up).

I have more Photon-related content planned, so stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy working with Photon and learning your way around.

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 Linux  Vagrant  CLI  Fusion  Virtualization  Photon
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