Photon is not an "app" that you "install", and that tarball is just the source code, equivalent to git cloneing the main repo. The docker image is for a prebuilt server.

Here's what thearch said on how to run the server yourself:

You'll need node.js and npm for the minimum node server.

• Run npm install to fetch the dependencies.
• Build the app with ADAPTER=node npm run build
• There should be a new directory, build.
• To run the app, do node build/index.js. You can set the documented environment variables, and use PORT= to change the port.

So docker is just a wrapper to provide the execution environment for photon in this case. You’ll either have to use docker as it’s really nothing more than installing the docker engine and that’s it, you just run commands provided by the photon dev.

Or

If you really don’t want to use docker for whatever reason, you’ll have to reverse engineer the actual code stack within the Dockerfile in the project that is used to build the image you’d otherwise just run. Again this is more more involved and the whole reason to use something like docker in the first place.

I can help with this, I'll PR this to the docs later.

You'll need node.js and npm for the minimum node server.

1. Run npm install to fetch the dependencies.
2. Build the app with ADAPTER=node npm run build
3. There should be a new directory, build.
4. To run the app, do node build/index.js. You can set the documented environment variables, and use PORT= to change the port.