Project Atomic is now sunset

The Atomic Host platform is now replaced by CoreOS. Users of Atomic Host are encouraged to join the CoreOS community on the Fedora CoreOS communication channels.

The documentation contained below and throughout this site has been retained for historical purposes, but can no longer be guaranteed to be accurate.

Operating System Upgrades via rpm-ostree

Project Atomic features a new update system for operating systems called rpm-ostree, also accessible via the atomic host command. In the default model, the RPMs are composed on a server into an OSTree repository, and client systems can replicate in an image-like fashion, including incremental updates.

Unlike traditional operating system update mechanisms, it will automatically keep the previous version of the OS, always available for rollback.

Upgrading a Machine with rpm-ostree

Simply invoke atomic host upgrade (aka rpm-ostree upgrade). This is somewhat like a yum update, except it updates all of the content as an atomic unit. The data origin is a $remotename:$branchname pair, for example on CentOS Atomic Host, it’s centos-atomic-host:centos-atomic-host/7/x86_64/standard. You can find the origin URL in /etc/ostree/remotes.d/centos-atomic-host.conf.

If a new version is found, it will first be downloaded, then deployed. At that point, a three-way merge of configuration is performed, using the new /etc as a base, and applying your changes on top.

After an update is prepared, you should systemctl reboot to cause the updates to take effect.

Rollback to the Previous Tree

By default, you always have a previous tree (an operating system snapshot) installed. So if something goes wrong, you can always fall back to the previous tree. The previous tree is available as a bootloader entry; to access the previous tree, hold down SHIFT during OS bootup and select the fallback tree in the bootloader menu.

If you boot into the new tree and determine that something is wrong, you can invoke rpm-ostree rollback.

Deploy a specific version

One of the major goals of the OSTree project is that operating system content should be versioned and integration tested together. Hence, each commit has a version number, and the client understands how to traverse history.

Try atomic host deploy <version number> to instruct the client to deploy an exact version - one that you may have integration tested.

Proxy Settings

For image upgrades behind a corporate internet proxy you simple add the proxy= line in /etc/ostree/remotes.d/centos-atomic-host.conf. Package layering is using another method and needs another modification: add the proxy= line in the corresponding repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d/. Please note: Adding this line in /etc/yum.conf doesn’t work!

Example: To install open-vm-tools: 1) Just add line: proxy=http://<proxy ip-address>:<proxy port> in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo below [base],[updates],[extras]. 2) Try atomic host install open-vm-tools to install the package. 3) systemctl reboot to activate. 4) Try atomic host status to reflect the change after reboot.

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