nickcharlton/boxes

A command line tool that takes the complexity out of building Vagrant boxes.

boxes

boxes takes the complexity out of building custom Vagrant boxes.

It's a command line tool which provides a set of templates and scripts to combine as you need. There are also a set of pre-build boxes which are regenerated regularly.

Installation & Requirements

[sudo] gem install boxes

boxes leans on Packer and VirtualBox, VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation for building boxes and these will need to available in your $PATH.

Usage

boxes is driven by the boxes command line tool, and works with artifacts inside it's own working directory. You need to specify a name for the build, a template to work with and the output provider. Something like so:

boxes build --name=trusty64-empty --template=ubuntu/trusty64 --provider=vmware

This will build a file called trusty64-empty.box in the current directory.

There's lots more to boxes than building simple empty Vagrant boxes like this, which can be see in the inline help.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/nickcharlton/boxes/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Author

Copyright (c) 2013 Nick Charlton [email protected]

boxes's Issues

builds fail with Packer > 0.5.0

the last known working version is 0.4.1.

Switch to the Chef DK.

The Ruby script is beginning to break on certain versions and so we should move to use the Chef Development Kit.

Problem: How do we ensure we're getting the latest version?

Add support for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily).

Add Ruby 2.2.0 to the ruby-install script.

This is now the current major version.

Reasonably consistent SSH Timeout errors.

This seems to occur more on non-SSD machines. And inconsistently on faster ones.

And it seems to affect all box templates.

VMware Tools fails to install.

This seems to be related to a change in suggested patterns. Instead, it should probably use open-vm-tools rather than installing from the disc image.

See: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073803

Allow configuring headlessness, ssh timeout, etc. from command line

The defaults are probably fine when simply building a box but it would be nice when debugging to be able to configure these. Setting a variable that's passed through to the ERB should be simple enough.

rake clean should remove packer_cache

Builds don't cancel when boxes is interrupted.

If you Ctrl-C a running operation, the thread controlling packer should receive it too.

A single Ctrl-C should request packer to stop, a "double" Ctrl-C should kill the thread and tidy up.

Puppet fails to install on Trusty.

It's not detecting the OS release name (i.e.: trusty, wheezy).

Wheezy no longer on mirror.

Due to wheezy being very old it no longer exists on most Debian CD mirrors. Below is a list of the mirrors that still carried it (or at least the amd64 arch) recently.

    http://debian.inode.at
    http://debian.carnet.hr
    http://ftp.carnet.hr
    http://debian.fastweb.it
    http://giano.com.dist.unige.it
    http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/Linux
    http://debian.ethz.ch

Add support for Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid).

Add support for Debian 9 (Jessie).

rake clean should remove log files.

Add Ruby 2.1.5 to the ruby-install script.

This is now the last major version.

Organization

Great project! I wanted to compile my thoughts while using this and hopefully contribute some in the process. The goal for me is to get this working with ansible and add some more machines like centos. I am not that famaliar with ruby or rake so hopefully you can give me a bit of guidance so I can submit some pull requests.

Default build

When I add another provisioner "ansible" and another distro "centos", the rake -T list gets pretty long. I think rake default should be renamed to rake all. The other issue is I don't need standard, chef, puppet so I was trying to think of a better command without manually typing out each box configuration.

Does rake have anything available to do something like rake build --type=ansible which would run all distros, targets, but only the type. Or you could run rake build --distros=debian,ubuntu --type=ansible? That way I don't have to type each configuration.

Adding centos

It looks like all the common scripts are geared toward debian based systems right now. What is a good way to re-structure this to add more systems that don't share a common debian base? Should it be common/debian/* and common/redhat/*. Since debian and ubuntu share the scripts it doesn't make sense to duplicate it in each folder.

Also I don't know that centos has codenames for builds so naming it 6.564.erb isnt appealing. Should I rename them all to raring-64.erb, centos6.5-64.erb?

I think thats it for now.