Vagrant Up and Running with VMware's Project Photon

Project Photon by VMware is a container-optimized Linux operating system that was announced today. We have packaged it as a Vagrant box to make experimenting with Photon using Vagrant an easy and enjoyable process.

Note: This guide requires that you have at least VMware Fusion 5.x+ or VMware Workstation 9.x+ installed. You must also have the corresponding Vagrant VMware plugin installed in Vagrant with a valid license.

1. First, clone the example repository from GitHub:

   $ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/photon-vagrant.git
   

2. Next, cd into the cloned project directory and run the appropriate vagrant up command for your VMware product:

   $ vagrant up --provider vmware_fusion
   $ vagrant up --provider vmware_workstation
   

   Note: If you see an error regarding "configure_networks", it can be ignored.

3. Run vagrant ssh to establish a secure shell connection to the Photon OS:

   $ vagrant ssh
   

   Now you have access to a container-optimized Linux operating system with Docker and Rkt already installed!

4. Test it out by running a Docker container:

   $ docker run -d -p 80:80 tutum/apache-php
   

5. Navigate to http://localhost in your browser and see the welcome screen:

   Note: Vagrant is forwarding the port (see the Vagrantfile for more information). If another process is using port 80, you may see an error and need to choose a different port.

Since VMware's Photon has rkt installed as well, simply run rkt to view the possible commands.

That's it — you can now experiment with building, testing, and running containers in a lightweight development environment with Vagrant and Project Photon!