how to install any software in coreos ?

[praneeth u]

Hi coreos team,

According to articles that i read on coreos, i came to know that there is no package manager. coreos is intended to run any service as container using docker.

what i want to know is, how to install any tool if needed. for example, i need to install btrfs-progs, i can clone the code from github, but to compile and install it,

i need gcc and make tools. I can get gcc tarball file, but to install it, i need make utility, so how do I install these dependencies ?

[Brandon Philips]

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 1:21 AM, praneeth u <prane...@gmail.com> wrote:
> for example, i need to install btrfs-progs, i can clone the code from
> github, but to compile and install it,
> i need gcc and make tools. I can get gcc tarball file, but to install it, i
> need make utility, so how do I install these dependencies ?

System level utilities for manipulating things like firewalls,
networking, etc are shipped with CoreOS. For example we ship e2fsprogs
and iptables.

In the case of btrfs-progs we don't ship it because we don't have
btrfs enabled in the developer alpha at this time.

If it would help your use case we can enable btrfs- we just haven't
had a reason to it thus far since we only use ext2 and ext4.

Thanks!

Brandon

[praneeth u]

How to install a software ? No package manager, so how can we do it ? To install any software via source tarball, we need dependencies such as gcc and others.
so how to install them ?

[Rob Szumski]

You install software in docker containers.

Step by Step Guide: http://coreos.com/docs/guides/docker/

Using CoreOS: http://coreos.com/using-coreos/

 - Rob

[Jayson]

Ok, but it appears the question still wasn't really answered; because it is recursive answers that don't address the problem.  You say that you install software using containers into CoreOS, but how do you get things installed into a container based on CoreOS because the container will not have a package manager, and therefore you do what?

[Jayson]

It maybe is some combination of:

http://coreos.com/docs/cluster-management/debugging/install-debugging-tools/

launched with http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-nspawn.html

yes?

[Brandon Philips]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Jayson <jayson...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, but it appears the question still wasn't really answered; because it is
> recursive answers that don't address the problem. You say that you install
> software using containers into CoreOS, but how do you get things installed
> into a container based on CoreOS because the container will not have a
> package manager, and therefore you do what?

A container can come from any source. It might be from a "base image"
of busybox, Debian, Arch, etc. Or it might be purpose built with just
the exact things that are needed using buildroot. The userspace that
your container comes from doesn't really matter.

Does that help?

Brandon

[Justin Cormack]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Jayson <jayson...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, but it appears the question still wasn't really answered; because it is
> recursive answers that don't address the problem. You say that you install
> software using containers into CoreOS, but how do you get things installed
> into a container based on CoreOS because the container will not have a
> package manager, and therefore you do what?

CoreOS is not intended for an OS to go inside containers, just to be
the host OS.

Justin

[Mauricio Tavares]

      An example I would have is: if I wanted to create a second user to manage coreos that is network authenticated and whose  homedir is nfs mounted, how would I go about it? AFAIK, autofs is not in coreos, which would then fall into the question presented by the OP (needs to be installed).

Justin

[Michael Marineau]

Sorry but right now we do not include PAM or any network auth scheme
that is based on it. You can add uses via cloud config and mounting
NFS filesystems should work so you can set up an account and mount
point statically.

[Mauricio Tavares]

      Actually, what I presented was but an example of when it would be a need to install software in coreos. Do not take it verbatim, for it was the first thing that popped into my mind. But the principle is the same as the original poster asked. And I do not know if it would be solved, as others suggested by simply using a container.

[Michael Marineau]

Yes, it would be possible to run a second sshd in a container that has
the required PAM modules to make it work. In order to have control
over the host system from this container you can use toolbox.
https://github.com/coreos/toolbox

[chris....@reancloud.com]

+1 for at least the ability to `make` things ...

[Brian Harrington]

On CoreOS everything is done inside of a container.  For your use case, the easiest would probably be to use a systemd-nspawn container (the easiest way to do this for beginners is just to run the script "toolbox.sh").

As an alternative you can also use the Gentoo stage 3 which includes the GCC, Make, and all of the other development tools you would expect.

--Brian 'redbeard' Harrington

[Devipriya Sarkar]

you could use coreos toolbox (https://github.com/coreos/toolbox)

[Charles Allen]

Is there a good way to pre-package container binaries into the disk images so that you don't need to fetch anything at boot time to run them?

[Brandon Philips]

If you control the disk images you can put anything you wish into the root partition and snapshot. Tools like Packer are popular for this: https://www.packer.io/intro/

Brandon