VMware Customize Portal

Installing the VMware Customize Portal plugin on Cloud Director 9.1 and 9.5

Building the plugin

Previously, VMware recommended using the Lifecycle Management plugin to install and manage plugins, however, there is now a plugin called Customize Portal which provides the same capability and is now part of the core product in vCloud Director 9.7.

To install this plugin, we first need to build it. First, we need npm so if this is not already installed, use the commands below to install it:

# Ubuntu 16.04:
sudo apt-get install npm

# Ubuntu 18.04:
sudo apt-get install npm
sudo npm install -g npm

# CentOS/RHEL:
sudo yum install npm

# Windows:
Download and install from: https://nodejs.org/en/

Now we can build the plugin:

mkdir customize-portal
cd customize-portal
git clone -b customize-portal --single-branch https://github.com/vmware-samples/vcd-ext-samples.git .

# install project dependencies 
npm ci

# build plugin
npm run build

Ubuntu 18.04 Commands:
# install project dependencies on Ubuntu 18.04 (Issues with npm versions)
/usr/local/bin/npm ci

# build plugin
/usr/local/bin/npm run build

Once built, there will be a folder called dist which includes all the information regarding the compiled plugin. We will need all 4 files from this directory to install it into vCloud Director.

Leave the folder by typing cd..

Installing the VMware Customize Portal Plug-in

To install the plugin, we need to use the python script provided by VMware in environments pre-9.7. This is available here and requires python.

Clone this repository using the commands below.

mkdir plugin-manager
cd plugin-manager
git clone -b plugin-manager --single-branch https://github.com/vmware-samples/vcd-ext-samples.git .
cp manage_plugin.json.template manage_plugin.json

Before the script can be used a configuration file must be created to configure access to a vCloud Director instance. Modify the values as appropriate inside manage_plugin.json as per the example below:

{
  "username": "administrator",
  "org": "System",
  "password": "P@$$w0rd",
  "vcdUrlBase": "https://vmware.example.com"
}

We need to copy the dist directory into the manage plugin folder now, therefore use the command below to complete this:

cp -R ../customize-portal/dist ./

Now finally, we can install the plugin using the python script:

python3 ./manage_plugin.py register

Confirm that the provider can now see Customize Portal in the vCD Provider interface.