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Copyright (c) 2014 Sebastien Varrette www

    Time-stamp: <Tue 2015-09-29 10:34 svarrette>

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Vagrant VMs

Management and Generation of customized Vagrant boxes (using packer and veewee)

Synopsis

The repository is meant to facilitate the generation of Vagrant boxes from the numerous templates offered by VeeWee -- a tool for easily (and repeatedly) building custom Vagrant base boxes, KVMs, and virtual machine images. Internally, veewee-to-packer is used to make the magical conversion.

Pre-requisite

Virtualbox / Vagrant

I made a short talk explaining Vagrant together with some installation notes. So you are more than encourage to take a look at it

• slides (PDF)

Repository Setup

First clone this repository:

 $> git clone https://github.com/Falkor/vagrant-vms.git
 $> cd vagrant-vms

Ensure RVM is correctly configured for this repository:

 $> rvm current

Configure the gem dependencies:

 $> gem install bundler
 $> bundle install
 $> rake -T     # should work ;) 

Configure the repository and its dependencies:

 $> rake setup

Prepare a new OS template

You can initiate a template for a given Operating System:

 $> rake packer:{Debian,CentOS,openSUSE,scientificlinux,ubuntu}:init

The template is generated in the packer/ script. You'll have to answer a couple of questions, including the version of the OS

(for instance packer/debian-7.5.0-amd64).

Build a Vagrant box

Once you have generated a template, you can build the corresponding Vagrant box using

 $> rake packer:{Debian,CentOS,openSUSE,scientificlinux,ubuntu}:build

If everything goes fine, you shall find your freshly generated box in packer/<os>-<version>-<arch>/<os>-<version>-<arch>.box that you can then add to your local box by running

 $> vagrant box add packer/<os>-<version>-<arch>/<os>-<version>-<arch>.box

Customizations

(in progress) Customization of the generated box is based on puppet and can be performed by the definition of profiles in the puppet/.

For each profile, a Puppetfile needs to be defined since the puppet environment will be later on initialized within the packer process using librarian-puppet or r10k. Then the appropriate manifest shall be defined.

Repackage a box

Assuming you made some final customization on your box, you can commit the changes you applied, you can package again the box (assuming the box is still up and running and configure to suit your tastes) via vagrant package

• Clean the VM to save some space. For that, you can invoke the zerodisk.sh script embedded in packer that has the following content:

    #!/bin/bash
    # Zero out the free space to save space in the final image:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/EMPTY bs=1M
    rm -f /EMPTY
  

• Ensure that the ~vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys hold the default public key used through all Vagrant public images

  • see vagrant key pair on Github

  • by default, this key is judged (on purpose) insecure and thus is overwritten with a new (random) key pair unless you set config.ssh.insert_key to false (default is true).

  • add it as follows:

     $> sudo -u vagrant wget -O ~vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys \
            --no-check-certificate \
            https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub
    

• Ensure the Guest additions for Virtualbox match. For that, you can rely on the vagrant-vbguest

    $> vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
    $> vagrant vbguest --status
    GuestAdditions versions on your host (5.0.4) and guest (4.3.26) do not match.
  

  In case of a mismatch, you can easily install the latest Guest additions within your running VM by running (you can safely ignore the error on Window System drivers):

    $> vagrant vbguest --do install --auto-reboot
    $> vagrant halt
    $> vagrant up
    [...]
    GuestAdditions 5.0.4 running --- OK.
  

• locate the name of the running VM by opening VirtualBox (vagrant-vms_default_1431034026308_70455 in the below example). Use the following command for that:

    $> VBoxManage list runningvms
  

Create the box (which will generate the file package.box) that you can then rename and share

    $> vagrant package \
        --base vagrant-vms_default_1431034026308_70455 \
        --output packer/<os>-<version>-<arch>/<os>-<version>-<arch>.box  # adapt accordingly

Now you can upload the generated box on Vagrant Cloud.

• select 'New version', enter the new version number, and add a new box provider (Virtualbox) to upload the generated box.
• Remember upon successful upload to release the uploaded box (by default it is unreleased).

Git Branching Model

The Git branching model for this repository follows the guidelines of gitflow.
In particular, the central repository holds two main branches with an infinite lifetime:

• production: the branch holding tags of the successive releases of this tutorial
• devel: the main branch where the sources are in a state with the latest delivered development changes for the next release. This is the default branch you get when you clone the repo, and the one on which developments will take places.

You should therefore install git-flow, and probably also its associated bash completion.
Also, to facilitate the tracking of remote branches, you probably wants to install grb (typically via ruby gems).

Then, to make your local copy of the repository ready to use my git-flow workflow, you have to run the following commands once you cloned it for the first time:

  $> rake setup 

Resources

Git

You should become familiar (if not yet) with Git. Consider these resources:

• Git book
• Github:help
• Git reference

Links

• Issues
• GitHub