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Environment Requirements

Upstream local-build reference

The Getting Started pages cover the local / manual build path (./build.sh, ./download.sh) inherited from upstream and span more operating systems than we build. Day-to-day, golden images are produced by the CI pipeline — see Operations → Architecture & Pipeline.

:octicons-cloud-24:   Platform

The project is tested on the following platforms:

::spantable:: | Platform | Version | | --------------- | ---------------------- | | VMware vSphere | 9.0 or later | | VMware vSphere | 8.0 Update 3h or later | ::end-spantable::

:octicons-stack-24:   Operating Systems

The project is tested on the following operating systems for the Packer host [^1] :

::spantable:: | Operating System | Version | Architecture | | :----------------- | :------ | :------------ | | VMware Photon OS | 5.0 | amd64 | | Ubuntu Server | 24.04 | amd64 | | macOS | Tahoe | arm64 | ::end-spantable::

:octicons-package-dependencies-24:   Tooling

All build tools are managed with mise — versions are pinned in .mise.toml (the single source of truth) and summarised in .mise.md. Install them with:

mise install

This provides Packer, Ansible (ansible-core), Terraform, gomplate, jq, govc, goss, and gh at their pinned versions. The Packer plugins (Ansible, vSphere, Git) are downloaded and initialized automatically by ./build.sh / packer init; for disconnected sites, pre-place them next to the Packer binary (/usr/local/bin) or in $HOME/.packer.d/plugins.

System packages

git and xorriso (Linux only) come from the system package manager, not mise. On macOS, also install coreutils (brew install coreutils).

[^1]: The project may work on other operating systems and versions, but has not been tested by the maintainers.