• xhyve, on top of we built, is a young project, so expect bugs!
• You must be running OS X Yosemite, 10.10.3, or later on a 2010, or later, Mac (i.e. one with a CPU that supports EPT) for things to work.
• if you use any version of VirtualBox prior to VirtualBox 4.3.30 then xhyve will crash your system either if VirtualBox is running, or had been run previously after the last reboot (see xhyve's issues #5 and #9 for the full context). So, if you are unable to update VirtualBox to the latest, either of the 4.x or 5.x streams, and were using it in your current session please do restart your Mac before attempting to run corectl.

• via homebrew's

  ❯❯❯ brew install corectl
  

• downloading from GitHub just go to our releases page and download the binary to your system, and then rename it to corectl placing it in some directory in your PATH (/usr/local/bin/ is a good choice)

❯❯❯ git clone [email protected]:TheNewNormal/corectl.git
❯❯❯ cd corectl
❯❯❯ make

the following command will fetch the latest CoreOS Alpha image available, verify it with the build public key, add an OEM xhyve personality and then load it over xhyve.

❯❯❯ sudo corectl run

In your terminal you should see something along this:

(...)
This is localhost (Linux x86_64 4.1.5-coreos) 13:23:20
SSH host key: d0:b7:8e:5a:ef:c3:ef:f5:4d:69:c0:ba:35:62:28:3c (DSA)
SSH host key: 2d:11:6f:7c:84:f7:36:34:e7:b9:a8:73:f9:1d:ae:72 (ED25519)
SSH host key: 31:02:9b:95:99:60:d8:5f:74:36:44:30:be:aa:65:ef (RSA)
eth0: 192.168.64.220 fe80::7817:77ff:fe6f:cf32

localhost login: core (automatic login)

CoreOS stable (779.0.0)
Update Strategy: No Reboots
Last login: Tue Aug 25 13:23:20 +0000 2015 on /dev/tty1.
core@localhost ~ $

you 'll find out that your ${HOME} become available (via NFS) inside your VM. that will come handy when you come to play with docker volumes later...

CoreOS over OSX made simple.
❯❯❯ http://github.com/TheNewNormal/corectl


Usage:
  corectl [flags]
  corectl [command]

Available Commands:
  rm          Removes one or more CoreOS images from local fs
  kill        Halts one or more running CoreOS instances
  ls          Lists locally available CoreOS images
  load        Loads from an instrumentation file (in TOML, JSON or YAML) one or more CoreOS instances
  version     Shows corectl version information
  ps          Lists running CoreOS instances
  pull        Pulls a CoreOS image from upstream
  run         Starts a new CoreOS instance
  ssh         Attach to or run commands inside a running CoreOS instance

Flags:
      --debug[=false]: adds extra verbosity, and options, for debugging purposes and/or power users

Use "corectl [command] --help" for more information about a command.

All flags can also be configured via upper-case environment variables prefixed with "COREOS_"
For example, "--debug" => "COREOS_DEBUG"

read here the full auto-generated documentation.

• create a volume to store your persistent data. (will be /var/lib/{docker|rkt})

  ❯❯❯ dd if=/dev/zero of=var_lib_docker.img  bs=1G count=16
  

  in this case we created it with 16GB.

• format it

  requires homebrew's e2fsprogs package installed.

  ❯❯❯ brew install e2fsprogs

  ❯❯❯ /usr/local/Cellar/e2fsprogs/1.42.12/sbin/mke2fs  -t ext4 -m0 -F var_lib_docker.img
  

• label it

  ❯❯❯ /usr/local/Cellar/e2fsprogs/1.42.12/sbin/e2label var_lib_docker.img rkthdd
  

  here, we labeled our volume rkthdd which is the signature that our recipe expects.

  by relying in labels for volume identification we get around the issues we'd have otherwise if we were depending on the actual volume name (/dev/vd...) as those would have to be hardcoded (an issue, if one is mix and matching multiple recipes all dealing with different volumes...)

• start your docker and rkt playground.

  ❯❯❯ sudo UUID=deadbeef-dead-dead-dead-deaddeafbeef \
    ./corectl run --volume absolute_or_relative_path/to/persistent.img \
    --cloud_config cloud-init/docker-only-with-persistent-storage.txt \
    --cpus 2 --memory 2048 --name containerland -d
  

this will start a VM named containerland in the background (-d) with the volume we created previously feeded, 2 virtual cores and 2GB of RAM. The provided cloud-config will format the given volume (if it wasn't yet) and bind mount both ``/var/lib/rktand/var/lib/docker` on top of it. docker will also become available through socket activation. above we passed arguments to the VM both via environment variables and command flags. both ways work, just use whatever suits your taste best.

Regarding docker, CoreOS shipped the 1.7 stream in all releases older than the 801.0.0 one. So, if you plan to run any of these releases, in order to talk to CoreOS' docker daemon you'll need on your Mac a matching docker client,as Homebrew is already defaulting on docker 1.8.x...

❯❯❯ brew remove docker
❯❯❯ brew tap homebrew/versions
❯❯❯ brew install docker171

• now, from another shell in your mac...

  ❯❯❯ ./corectl ps
  

found 2 running VMs, summing 3 vCPUs and 4096MB in use.

• containerland, alpha/794.0.0, PID 17645 (detached=true), up 1m28.687154135s

  • 2 vCPU(s), 2048 RAM
  • cloud-config: /Users/am/go/src/github.com/AntonioMeireles/corectl/cloud-init/docker-only-with-persistent-storage.txt
  • Network Interfaces:
    • eth0 (public interface) 192.168.64.14
  • Volumes:
    • /dev/vda (/Users/am/go/src/github.com/AntonioMeireles/corectl/var_lib_docker.img)

• xpto, alpha/794.0.0, PID 17648 (detached=true), up 1m26.141238951s

  • 1 vCPU(s), 2048 RAM
  • Network Interfaces:
    • eth0 (public interface) 192.168.64.15
    • eth1 (private interface/tap0 on host)

  ❯❯❯ docker -H 192.168.64.220:2375 images -a REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED VIRTUAL SIZE busybox latest 8c2e06607696 4 months ago 2.43 MB 6ce2e90b0bc7 4 months ago 2.43 MB

or ...

❯❯❯ ./corectl ssh containerland
Last login: Wed Sep  2 17:02:44 2015
CoreOS stable (789.0.0)
Update Strategy: No Reboots
core@localhost ~ $

❯❯❯ ./corectl ssh containerland "sudo rkt list"
UUID	ACI	STATE	NETWORKS

• have fun!

• Rimas Mocevicius entire toolset of OS X GUI apps is now using corectl underneath.
  • coreos-osx - CoreOS VM for OS X
  • kube-solo-osx - Kubernetes Solo Cluster for OS X
  • kube-cluster-osx - Multi node Kubernetes Cluster for OS X (work in progress)

• Michael Steil for releasing in the wild his awesome xhyve lightweight OS X virtualization solution and Jeremy Sequoia, from Apple, for taking stewardship of it allowing it to move forward.
• Camilo Aguilar for his xhyve golang bindings
• Brandon Philips who come with the original, bash based, coreos-xhyve prototype that this project supersedes

corectl is an open source project under the Apache License, Version 2.0, ence contributions are gladly welcomed!