Patches a vanilla Ubuntu installer image with a preseed file that takes care of automating the installation process and then live-provisions a new VM to become a Vagrant box.
Currently uses Ubuntu 14.04.3 amd64 server as a base. VirtualBox is used as a provider for Vagrant.
Sometimes you need to build a base box to be used with Vagrant entirely from scratch. Not based upon some untrusted public base box, or a hand-crafted VM that cannot easily be updated or shared.
Under the premise that you're working with VirtualBox as a provider for Vagrant and Ubuntu is your OS of choice, preseeding comes as a natural choice for automating the installation process. When a new Ubuntu release comes around, you want to be able to switch seamlessly without any manual steps involved.
Future versions of this tool may add support for other OS and different providers. Please feel inspired! I'd be happy to see contributions of any kind!
The whole process is wrapped inside Docker containers, so there's no need to install any additional packages.
All you need to do is to invoke:
$ ./plant-and-wait
... and wait :-)
With any luck, you'll end up with a Docker container that appears as if it's stuck at:
[...]
==> virtualbox-iso: Waiting 10s for boot...
==> virtualbox-iso: Typing the boot command...
==> virtualbox-iso: Waiting for SSH to become available...
This is VirtualBox running the Ubuntu install process in headless mode, which means that you don't get to see any output for a short while.
You will see more progress being made eventually, so don't worry – how long it takes exactly really depends on how powerful your workstation is.
The timeout value for this operation is set to 30 minutes, but usually it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes on any halfway decent system to complete.
Once the script returned, you'll find that the resulting .box file was stored
inside the output/ directory.
Note: If you're not part of the docker group, the tool must be run with
superuser privileges:
$ sudo ./plant-and-wait
You may want to have some additional commands be invoked as a final provisioning
step. In order to achieve that, just put any number of scripts in the
provision_extra/ directory. Make sure that your script names do not start with
a dot and have the .sh file extension, otherwise they will be ignored.
Please see LICENSE for licensing details.