Docker + Raspberry Pi = Photon OS

Hi, in this post I want to share how to build a simple, cheap Docker server container hosted on a Raspberry PI.
As always I was looking for a fast and easy way to test my code and experiments.

Here comes Photon OS^TM from vm-ware, an open source minimal Linux container optimized for vm-ware infrastructure that the latest release 3.0 has introduced the ARM64 support, so it can run on a Raspberry Pi 3.

PhotonOS setup

Let’s start and download the latest ready to flash image for Raspberry.
As you can see it’s only 53MB size and 512MB once decompressed.
Flash it on a uSD card with your favorite imager tool, I use win32diskimager on my platform. During the first boot the image will autoresize to use all the available space.
You can login directly from raspberry or if look on your DHCP server you should find an IP for photon-rpi3 hostname and open the console ssh by using:

root as username
changeme as password

first you will be asked to change the password for security; retype the old pass changeme and then put a new one.

Photon OS use tdnf as package manager so to update all at the last release launch:

tdnf -y distro-sync

However the Docker service is not installed yet, but first we will install some other useful tools.
If you need to change your keyboard layout:

tdnf -y install kbd

then to have a list of available keymaps:

localectl list-keymaps

and to change it:

localectl set-keymap us

the vim text editor is already installed but I prefer nano so:

tdnf -y install nano

to set a static IP:

nano /etc/systemd/network/10-static.network

and set your network parameters:

[Match]
Name=eth0
[Network]
Address=192.168.x.x/24
Gateway=192.168.x.y
DNS=192.168.x.y
DHCP=no

to activate the network changes:

chmod 644 /etc/systemd/network/10-static.network
systemctl restart systemd-networkd

If you made the changes by an ssh console now reconnect with the new ip address.

Now some optional settings with a netmanger:

tdnf -y install netmgmt

The following fix should be applied cause netmgmt broke names resolution

rm -f /etc/resolv.conf
ln -s /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

to set others network configuration like ntp server:

netmgr ntp_servers --add --servers 0.pool.ntp.org
netmgr ntp_servers --add --servers 1.pool.ntp.org

or the hostname:

netmgr hostname --set --name <hostname>

After that we are ready to install Docker.

Docker Setup

First install the docker service

tdnf -y install docker
systemctl enable docker
systemctl start docker

in addition to see docker in action we will install portainer to make also things easy to handle:

docker pull portainer/portainer

we create a volume to persist the data configuration

docker volume create portainer_data

then we start the container

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name portainer --restart always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer

open your browser and navigate to the IP of the raspberry Pi

http://192.168.x.y:9000

the first time portainer will ask you the creation of the admin user

then select to handle the local environment and connect

Now you can handle your images and containers in a simply way

Next time I’ll show you how powerful could be this system.

Enjoy!