Fedora CoreOS at Hetzner Cloud

Install Fedora CoreOS via terraform on a vServer at Hetzner Cloud.

This howto is no longer working, see #1 for more details. I recommend using this terraform module instead.

Prerequisites 🤓

Clone repository

Clone this repository into any folder on your host machine and follow the instructions.

Setup Terraform

If not done already install Terraform as instructed. E.g. via brew install terraform or download the apropriate binary for your operating system.

Now, change into the cloned repo dir, and exec terraform init to install the terraform Hetzner Cloud Provider.

Build coreos-installer

Currently the coreos-installer is not available as a binary. Therefore, you need to install rust's package manager cargo and build the binary on a linux-machine with cargo install --target-dir . coreos-installer.

The resulting binary will be copied by Terraform to the vServer in rescue mode, so you have to move it as coreos-installer into your working directory. Building the binary in rescue mode on the vServer will fail, if there is not enough space on the initramfs (like on cx11).

Get it up and running! 🚀

Last configurations

In the section Variables of the main.tf, adjust the default values for ssh_public_key, ssh_public_key_name, hcloud_server_type, hcloud_server_datacenter and hcloud_server_name to your needs or add a .tfvars file to set your desired settings. Optionally, have a look at the config.yaml. This file will be used by the coreos-installer to configure the OS.

Provision it!

Run terraform apply, enter your Hetzner Cloud API Token when prompted, and let the magic be done!

After a successful installation, you will see the message Apply complete! Resources: 2 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed..

SSH into it

terraform show outputs you all information about your new machine:

# hcloud_server.master:
resource "hcloud_server" "master" {
    backups      = false
    datacenter   = "fsn1-dc14"
    id           = "1234567"
    image        = "fedora-32"
    ipv4_address = "88.xxx.xxx.xxx"
    ipv6_address = "2a01:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::1"
    ipv6_network = "2a01:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::/64"
    keep_disk    = false
    labels       = {
        "os" = "coreos"
    }
    location     = "fsn1"
    name         = "www1"
    rescue       = "linux64"
    server_type  = "cx11"
    ssh_keys     = [
        "1234567",
    ]
    status       = "running"
}

As defined in the config.yaml, a new user core has been added, so you can ssh via ssh core@88.xxx.xxx.xxx to your fresh Fedora CoreOS machine!

Do it again ➰

If you need other configurations, want to add more servers: run terraform destroy, confirm with yes and now adjust the files to your needs and recreate the infrastructure via terraform apply. But keep a look at the Hetzner Cloud Portal to ensure that there haven't been spawned any "ghost machines" 👻