Photon RPM OSTree: 6 Installing a server
This is the server that is going to be used by a system administrator or a package installer developer to compose filesystem trees. The first step is to download the ISO for the desired release, if you have not done that already:
Photon 1.0 GA ISO file
Photon 1.0 Rev2 ISO file
Photon OS 2.0 Beta ISO file
Installation steps are the same to all Photon OS versions, except that for Photon 2.0, there are several steps needed post-install; they will be explained later.
Create a new VM in Fusion, Workstation or ESXi box, and go through the steps common to all installation profiles, then select the "Photon OSTree Server" option.
Continue with setting up a host name (like photon-srv) and a root password and that's all you need. Installation took about 40 seconds for Fusion running on my Mac with SSD, but it should take longer time for spin hard drives.
For Photon 1.0, once the server boots, the RPM-OSTree repository is ready to accept pull request from hosts, because setting up a 'minimal' tree is part of installation. This ostree 'minimal' configuration is almost identical, as far as packages list, to the Minimal installation profile selected from installer menu.
Also part of installation, an Apache web server is configured to expose the server's OSTree repo to http clients. If you want to also serve https, you need to take additional steps - install certificates specific to your organization, that I won't cover here.
You may now login to get the machine's IP address, as you will need to pass it to the Photon RPM-OSTree hosts that want to connect to this server. You may ask your network administrator for a static IP, registered to your company's DNS, so your users who install Photon RPM-OSTree hosts will enter a pretty name like http://photon-srv.yourcompany.com, rather than remember a numeric IP address.
Having the server configured, you may advance to next chapter to install your own host from this server's repository. That's a way to verify right away that all components (server, network) are running correctly and test the 'minimal' server filetree image by downloading and installing it at the host.
If you've installed Photon 2.0 OSTree server, the server did not setup a tree as part of an installation, but configuration files for starter 'base', 'minimal' and 'full' tree are created for you. Skip to Chapter 8: File oriented server operations and Chapter 9: Package oriented server operations to learn how to initialize and create your own customized file tree, then come back to Chapter 7 for installing a host from it.
All Photon OS versions support automated install that will not interact with the user, in other words installer will display its progress, but will not prompt for any keys to be clicked, and will boot at the end of installation. This will create an identical server as installing via UI.
If not familiar with the way kickstart works, visit Kickstart Support in Photon OS. The kickstart json config for OSTree is similar to minimal or full, except for "type": "ostree_server" setting.