It is recommended currently to only use fedostree inside a non-essential, disposable virtual machine (or a similar physical machine). While OSTree is carefully engineered to be safe, there is the fact that at the moment the binaries are not GPG signed nor is TLS not provided on the current server.
If you just want to experiment with complete safety, a prebuilt VM image is provided here. It's called fedostree-f20-demo.img.xz. To install, you must first uncompress it with xz -d fedostree-f20-demo.img.xz. Then using e.g. virt-manager, choose "Import existing disk image".
First, install the ostree package, of course; make sure you have ostree 2013.7 or newer.
yum install ostree
Now, this bit of one time initialization will both create /ostree for you, as well as /ostree/deploy/fedostree.
ostree admin os-init fedostree
This step tells OSTree how to find the repository you built on the server. You only need to do this once.
ostree remote add --set=gpg-verify=false fedostree http://rpm-ostree.cloud.fedoraproject.org/repo
At this point, we have only initialized configuration. Let's start by downloading the "minimal" install (just @core):
ostree pull fedostree fedostree/20/x86_64/base/minimal
This step extracts the root filesystem, and updates the bootloader configuration:
ostree admin deploy --os=fedostree fedostree/20/x86_64/base/minimal
We need to do some initial setup before we actually boot the system. Copy in the storage configuration:
cp /etc/fstab /ostree/deploy/fedostree/current/etc
And set a root password:
chroot /ostree/deploy/fedostree/current passwd
And there is one final (manual) step: You must copy your system's kernel arguments from /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and add them to /boot/loader/entries/ostree-fedora-0.conf, on the options line. This step may be automated further in the future.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must use selinux=0 for now.
Remember, at this point there is no impact on your installed system except for additional disk space in the `/boot/loader` and `/ostree` directories.
Reboot, and get a GRUB prompt. At the prompt, press `c`. Now, enter:
insmod blscfg bls_import
Then press `Esc`. You should have an additional boot menu entry, named `ostree:fedora:0`. Nagivate to it and press `Enter`.
To upgrade, run as root
ostree admin upgrade
Note that in our demo so far, we did not install `yum` (or even `rpm`). Getting these to work fully is the next phase of the `yum-ostree` development.
But with OSTree, it's possible to atomically transition between different complete bootable filesystem trees. Let's now try the standard-docker-io tree:
ostree pull fedostree fedostree/20/x86_64/server/docker-io
If you look at the products.json script you can see this tree contains @core, @standard, and finally docker-io.
Like above, let's now deploy it:
ostree admin deploy --os=fedostree fedostree/20/x86_64/server/docker-io systemctl reboot