Installing rancheros on virtualbox

Rancheros is a simple linux operating system, equipped with docker for easy deployment of docker in a virtual machine.

In this example, we will use virtualbox as our hypervisor.

First, download the rancheros iso from here

$ wget https://releases.rancher.com/os/v1.5.6/rancheros.iso

Then, fire up virtualbox and create a linux 64-bit virtual machine with 1GB memory, 8GB hard disk, and a bridged network.

Next mount the rancheros.iso file to the cdrom of the virtual machine we just created above, and boot the virtual machine.

Once booted, open the virtual machine console, change the password, and get the ip address of the virtual machine.

$ sudo passwd rancher

$ ip address

In this example, I will use 10.0.0.10 as the ip address of the virtual machine. Now, fire up your terminal, and ssh into the virtual machine.

$ ssh rancher@10.0.0.10

Once logged in, we will create a pair of ssh key for the user

$ ssh-keygen

We need to keep the private key in our host machine, so that we can use it to login to the virtual machine once we have installed rancheros to disk. So open another terminal, and download the private key we just generated above.

$ scp rancher@10.0.0.10:~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/rancher_id_rsa

Now we have to create a cloud-config.yml file, that is needed for rancheros installation to disk. We will have to include the ssh public key generated above, into the cloud-config.yml

$ echo -e "ssh_authorized_keys:\n  - $(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)" > cloud-config.yml

Install rancheros to disk using ros command.

$ sudo ros install -c cloud-config.yml -d /dev/sda

Once finished, you can ssh into the rancheros on virtual machine's disk, by including the rancher_id_rsa file into your ssh command

$ ssh -i ~/rancher_id_rsa rancher@10.0.0.10

Once logged in, you can now start using docker.

$ docker version