Choosing between a Rhino export or Sentinel package

There are two options for preparing your application as input to the VM Build Container. If your application is based on the Sentinel platform, we recommend using a Sentinel standalone package. Otherwise, you should use a Rhino export.

Sentinel package

To create a Sentinel package, follow the instructions in the Sentinel standalone packages documentation. Your output file should be named sentinel-package.zip. Make sure you add .zip to the output name so the package gets saved as a zip file.

Rhino export

Install your application into Rhino locally

After writing your application, you first need to deploy the application into Rhino version 3.0.0 locally. It does not matter if you use an SDK or production Rhino deployment for this purpose.

This guide does not describe how to write your application or how to deploy it into Rhino; this is described in the Rhino documentation.

Important

If installing into a production Rhino deployment, ensure no per-node activation state is set before taking an export. You can achieve this using the setdefaultdesiredstatefromnode or removepernodedesiredstate commands. For more information about these commands, run help declarative in the Rhino console.

Create a Rhino export

The VM Build Container takes as input a Rhino export created from a local deployment of your application into Rhino. It then creates a VM image containing your application by importing your export into a production Rhino on the VM.

Perform these steps to create your Rhino export.

  1. Find your Rhino home directory, and cd into it.

  2. Run the rhino-export command, making sure to provide the -s option:

    If exporting from a Rhino SDK installation, run:

    ./client/bin/rhino-export -J -s my_rhino_export

    This will create a my_rhino_export directory in your Rhino home directory. For more details on how to run the rhino-export command, refer to the Rhino administration guide.

  3. Create a zip file of your Rhino export:

    cd my_rhino_export
zip -r ../rhino-export.zip .

    This zip file rhino-export.zip will be the input to the VM Build Container.

  4. You can now remove the my_rhino_export directory if desired:

    cd ..
rm -rf my_rhino_export
Important

It is important to specify the -s flag to rhino-export to ensure configuration will not be included in the export. This is to ensure no compatibility issues occur (when exporting from SDK Rhino) and to ensure no incorrect configuration gets applied to the resulting VM.
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