Build an ISO from the Source Code for Photon OS

1: Building the ISO

You can build an ISO from the source code for Photon OS. This section describes how to build the ISO, use the cached toolchain and RPMS, and cached sources. You can use this method as an alternative to downloading a pre-built version.

For information on how to install and build a package on Photon OS from the package’s source RPM, see the Photon OS Administration Guide.

1 - Building the ISO

Perform the following steps to install the packages on Ubuntu:

Install the packages:

sudo apt-get -y install bison gawk g++ createrepo python-aptdaemon genisoimage texinfo python-requests libfuse-dev libssl-dev uuid-dev libreadline-dev kpartx git bc

Get Docker:
```
wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh
```
Install pip and docker 2.3.0
```
sudo apt install python3-pip
pip3 install docker==2.3.0
```
If you encounter an error for LOCALE when you run these commands, then export the following variables in the terminal:
```
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
```
The default configuration parameters are available in config.json. If you want to customize them, then the configuration information is available at the following location:
```
[https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/dev/photon-build-config.txt](https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/dev/photon-build-config.txt)
```
Clone`the Photon project:
git clone https://github.com/vmware/photon.git cd $HOME/workspaces/photon
Make ISO as follows:
sudo make iso
Make Minimal ISO as follows:
sudo make minimal-iso
Make Real-Time ISO as follows:
sudo make rt-iso

Result

This command first builds all RPMs corresponding to the SPEC files in your Photon repository and then builds a bootable ISO containing those RPMs.

The RPMs thus built are stored under stage/RPMS/ directory within the repository, using the following directory hierarchy:

$HOME/workspaces/photon/stage/:
├──RPMS/:
    ├──noarch/*.noarch.rpm    [Architecture-independent RPMs]
    ├──x86_64/*.x86_64.rpm    [RPMs built for the x86-64 architecture]
    ├──aarch64/*.aarch64.rpm  [RPMs built for the aarch64 (ARM64) architecture]

The ISO is created at $HOME/workspaces/photon/stage/photon.iso.