vagrant-boxer

This project devoted to simplified process of custom vagrant box configuration.

Update: it's probably better to use veewee. I didn't know about it when I made this project. Leaving the repo just in case.

Guest system installation

I prefer to use Debian for servers, so this guide would be about Debian only (I think you might find something useful for other operating systems too).

First, you need to install VirtualBox to make things happen.

Then you need to download debian installer iso, e.g debian-squeeze-i386-6.0.7-netinst which was used here.

###The following settings were used:###

RAM size 384 MB
VDI disk image
Dynamic size: 40 GB
Settings → System → Motherboard → Boot order → Diskette was disabled
Settings → Audio was disabled
Settings → Network was set to NAT

###Installation process settings are default:###

Language: English
Location: United States
Keyboard layout: American English
Hostname: vagrant
Domain name: empty
Root password: vagrant
Main account login: vagrant
Main account password: vagrant
Timezone: Eastern
Partitioning method: Guided → use entire disk
All files on the same partition
Swap partition size: 768 MB
Debian archive mirror country: United States
Debian archive mirror: ftp.us.debian.org
No proxy
No popularity-contest
Additional packages: ssh server, standard system utilities
GRUB installed to MBR

You can create your own Virtual Machine with custom settings based on the above settings.

###Basic configuration before creating vagrant box:###

To prepare virtual machine for packaging you should login as root and run post-install.sh which you can find in this repository. You can do it by executing the following command:

wget -O- https://raw.github.com/dhampik/vagrant-boxer/master/post-install.sh | bash

Read comments in post-install.sh to figure out how does it work.

###We can now package virtual machine into vagrant box:###

# Create dir anyware to store vagrant box, name doesn't matter
mkdir vagrant
cd vagrant
# "vagrant-box-debian-6.0.6-i386" is the name of virtual machine listed in virtualbox manager
vagrant package --base vagrant-box-debian-6.0.6-i386 --output base-debian-squeeze-i386.box

###You can now run your own vagrant box:###

# change dir to the one where you saved your packaged vagrant box
cd vagrant
# Add vagrant box to the list of your boxes and name it "dev-box"
vagrant box add dev-box base-debian-squeeze-i386.box
# Create dir for you vagrant project and change current dir to it
mkdir dev-env
cd dev-env
# Init vagrant box
vagrant init dev-box
# Run vagrang box
vagrant up

Now you have your vagrant box up and running. You can access it via ssh. If you are using Windows, you should do the following to access vagrant box via PuTTy:

install PuTTy
convert the %HOMEPATH%\.vagrant.d\insecure_private_key to .ppk using PuTTYGen (Run puttygen, load key, save private key)
use the above converted .ppk key for your PuTTY session (This could be configured through Connection → SSH → Auth → Private key file option when you create a new session)

###Here you should use different provision scripts and cookbooks to setup all required software###