boxes

A collection of templates for generating some Vagrant base boxes. The idea is that it should be easy to automate rebuilding these (in all of the formats you need) to keep the boxes you use with Vagrant updated.

Requirements

• ruby / rake
• Packer >= v0.3.4

You will also need VirtualBox and/or VMware Fusion/Workstation compatible with Packer (and, in the case of VMware Fusion, ensured that the virtual machine tools are downloaded and available).

Usage

This uses rake and embedded Ruby templates to assemble the templates Packer expects and help with automation. This allows us to programatically create many templates with small alterations (e.g.: with or without Chef), without defining lots of Packer source templates.

$ rake -T
rake default    # Build all of the boxes in all configurations.
rake clean      # Tidy up.

rake build:precise64-standard-virtualbox
rake build:precise64-chef-virtualbox
rake build:wheezy64-standard-virtualbox
rake build:wheezy64-chef-virtualbox
<snip>

standard aims to follow the pattern followed by the default Vagrantboxes (both Puppet and Chef), using the recommended installation method for each.

With a reasonably fast internet connection and SSD, the time taken to build each both is approximately 15-20 minutes. (Or about 2 hours for a complete set per distro.)

Credits

Copyright (c) 2013 Nick Charlton. MIT licensed.

This is inspired by the GDS's boxes repo, and would have been impossible without some of the scripts which accompany VeeWee.