Adding own bosh-releases to MicroPCF, and e.g.: diego-release? about pcfdev

[abh1kg]

I was about to ask the same question before I stumbled upon this. I would like to know about this too

[sclevine]

Hi @SamuelMarks,

You cannot build an official version of PCF Dev (that includes services brokers) using this repo. However, you can fork this repo and modify its contents to build a version of PCF Dev that includes the Elastic Runtime along with your own BOSH-deployed components.

@mdelillo, could you explain what changes are now necessary to add new BOSH releases?

[abh1kg]

Hi @mdelillo , @sclevine ,
First off, I must say pcf-dev is really cool thing for developers.
Can you please share the steps to add new BOSH releases to pcf-dev?

Thanks

[mdelillo]

@SamuelMarks @abhikco the bosh releases used by PCF Dev are specified in the versions.json file in the root of the repo. We compile each bosh release and provide a URL to the resulting tgz on S3. If you want to add a release that exists on your local filesystem, you can use path instead of url. For example:

[
  {
    "name" : "cf",
    "url" : "s3://pcfdev/compiled-releases/cf-v235-1-ge9635da.tgz"
  },
  ...
  {
    "name" : "my-bosh-release",
    "path" : "/path/to/my-bosh-release"
  }
]

You then need to edit images/manifest.yml. Add your new release to the releases array, your release jobs to jobs.templates, and your job properties to properties. Then you should be able to build PCF Dev using images/build.

[SamuelMarks]

@mdelillo Hmm, so is there any real advantage to this approach, when compared with adding bosh-releases to the relevant files within bosh-lite/packer?

[sclevine]

The advantage to our approach is that you don't need to spin up a BOSH director on the VM and deploy all the CF services to individual containers at runtime. (That's what people use BOSH-lite for.)

While it might be possible to do a BOSH deploy of CF to a BOSH-lite VM and packer-ize the result, the added complexity and resource consumption of that approach was less than ideal when I tried it. There's no reason to think that it wouldn't be possible to do this, but it's not the approach we're taking.