I recently bought a new dedicated server from Kimsufi, which is much more powerful than my old one. Rather than just installing Ubuntu, Debian or Arch and setting up services, I thought I’d try and go down the Docker route with CoreOS. This turned out to be much easier than I anticipated! So here’s a quick rundown of how I got it working.

Kimsufi do not provide a CoreOS template to install, so we will be using the netboot rescue feature to install it manually on our server.

Installing CoreOS

• In your Kimsufi dashboard, click ‘Netboot’, and select ‘Rescue’. You will then be asked to reboot your server.

• Once rebooted, you will receive an email with an IP, username and password to use with SSH.

• Log in via SSH, and create a cloud-config.yaml file like below

# vi cloud-config.yaml

#cloud-config

users:
  - name: "..."
    groups:
      - "sudo"
      - "docker"
    ssh-authorized-keys:
      - "ssh-rsa "..."

Replace name with the username you wish to use to log in to CoreOS, and ssh-rsa with your public ssh key.

• Next, download the CoreOS installer, and run it with the cloud-config.yaml you just created.

# wget https://raw.github.com/coreos/init/master/bin/coreos-install

# ./coreos-install -d /dev/sda -C stable -c cloud-config.yaml

• When CoreOS has been installed, go back to the Kimsufi dashboard, and change your netboot setting back to ‘Hard Drive’ and reboot again.

• You should now be able to SSH to your CoreOS install with the username and private key provided.

• From here on, you can set up docker containers, which will be another post. For now, you can read about Getting Started with Docker on the CoreOS website.