• Diff for "Teams/Cloud/VagrantBaseBoxes"

Introduction

This is a Work in Progress to build official Debian base boxes for Vagrant available in Atlas, the vagrant cloud backend.

• This blog post from Joey Hess provides a good overview of why we need official Debian base boxes.

Base Box details

Content

Standard Debian system, as created by the Debian Installer (all packages with priority required, important, standard), with the following Vagrant specific enhancements

• vagrant unix user, setup according to Upstream recommendations

• Speed improvements
  • disable DNS resolution in sshd (speed up logins)
  • use a 0s grub timeout to speed up booting
• Disk size improvements:
  • fill the unused blocks of the file systems with zeroes to reduce disksize

Note that we don't install the Virtualbox guest additions as it would mean pulling package outside the main debian archive. Contrary to what the scary vagrant up message says, Vagrant and Virtualbox don't need the Virtualbox guest additions for shared folders and port forwarding.

Provisioners

The box does not include provisioners. You can install them at startup by adding in the Vagrant.configure block in your Vagrantfile

# puppet
config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "apt-get install --yes puppet"
# ansible does not need a client, but needs python-apt to install packages
config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "apt-get install --yes python-apt"

Shared folders

This boxes use vagrant rsync to share the current directory to the /vagrant directory inside the box. Syncing happens once when you fires vagrant up, if you want this to happen continuously in the background, start vagrant rsync-auto afterwards.

On Windows, we recommend to start Vagrant from a Cygwin or Msys environment, in which you have installed ssh and rsync.

Alternatively on all platforms, you can use the vagrant-vbguest plugin to build the Virtualbox guest extensions.

Build process

The boxes are currently with Packer from the following git repository http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/cloud/debian-vm-templates.git/ and uploaded to Hashicorps's Atlas.

See ?Teams/Cloud/RebuildVagrantBaseBoxes to build the boxes yourself or extend them.

Versioning schema

We use the following versioning scheme: DEBIAN VERSION NUMBER + BOX VERSION Ex: 8.0.4 means we use the box uses the Debian release 8.0, the .4 means it is the fourth version based on this release that we uploaded to Atlas

DFSG

The build process requires the contrib virtualbox package. The reason virtualbox is in contrib is the non DFSG compiler required for compiling the BIOS.

GPG verification

Signed checksums of the latest boxes are available at https://cloud.alioth.debian.org/vagrantboxes/

After downloading the checksum and the signature files, you can verify the box authenticity by running gpg --verify against the signature file:

gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.gpg
gpg: Signature made Fri 11 Sep 2015 12:19:50 AM CEST using RSA key ID 91E95791
gpg: Good signature from "Emmanuel "Kasper" Kasprzyk <emmanuel@libera.cc>"

vagrant box add \
--checksum ee9cd1a4bc5fc2f2944a07e8571c6a46b74e0b47da2449912d537a8257ceba9e \
--checksum-type sha256 debian/jessie64 

Debian account on Atlas

Currently owned by EmmanuelKasper and AntonioTerceiro, upload rights have been granted to ?JanNiggerman

Todo list

We use this trello board: https://trello.com/b/lVRI6QJt/offical-debian-vagrant-base-boxes

People Involved

JanNiggemann, EmmanuelKasper, Antonio Terceiro