Installing Fedora CoreOS on an OVHcloud VPS (2025 edition)

OVHcloud offers affordable virtual private servers with unmetered network traffic and KVM console access which makes them a great pick for self-hosting. This is an updated version of the same guide from 2021.

Installation from rescue mode

Fedora CoreOS is not offered as an installation option for those systems so you can pick any Linux distribution when ordering the server. We will workaround that by doing the installation via the rescue mode.

Booting up in rescue mode

To boot into the Rescue mode, we need to go to the OVHcloud console and select the Boot -> Reboot into rescue mode menu entry in the interface. We can then access the KVM console from the Name -> KVM menu entry. The IP, user and password to connect to the system will be displayed on the console.

Installing podman (and runc)

The rescue system is a Debian based disk image where we can install podman and runc.

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install podman runc

As there is almost no free space on the rescue disk image, we need to cleanup the cache before we can download any container image:

$ rm -rf /var/cache/apt

Installing Fedora CoreOS

We can find which disk is the one we want to install Fedora CoreOS to with:

$ lsblk

We can copy our Ignition config to the server and do the installation by following the Installing from the container section from the docs:

$ podman run --pull=always --privileged --rm \
    -v /dev:/dev -v /run/udev:/run/udev -v .:/data -w /data \
    quay.io/coreos/coreos-installer:release \
    install /dev/sdb -i config.ign

We will need to provide an Ignition config as part of the installation as there is no metadata server to serve SSH keys from.

Finally, we can reboot our VPS out of the rescue mode via Boot -> Reboot my VPS menu entry in the interface.