Vagrant Container Templates

Vagrant Container Templates

Purpose

Spin up different OS container types using Vagrant and learn Ansible at the same time if desired. These are based on the same concepts that I used for Vagrant-Box-Templates.

Requirements

Software

NOTE: If you do not have v1.9.4 at a minimum installed when you run vagrant up Vagrant will attempt to load hashicorp/boot2docker within Virtualbox and will not leverage (native) locally installed Docker. When this happens these will not work properly (at this time). After researching this quickly it looks like the reason/workaround is related to this.

Useful information

Docker images

All of the images for each distro are available on Docker Hub which are the default images that are pulled down for each distro when testing with this repo.

Usage

Getting started

Clone repo

git clone https://github.com/mrlesmithjr/vagrant-container-templates.git
cd vagrant-container-templates

Choose distro

Customizing environment

Each distro folder contains a containers.yml file which you can change the number of containers to spin up if desired.

containers.yaml:

---
- name: 'container0'
  ansible_groups:
    - 'test_nodes'
  build: false
  image: mrlesmithjr/vagrant-containers:xenial64
  provision: false
  # port_forwards:
  #   - guest: '80'
  #     host: '8080'
  #   - guest: '443'
  #     host: '4433'
- name: 'container1'
  ansible_groups:
    - 'test_nodes'
  build: false
  image: mrlesmithjr/vagrant-containers:xenial64
  provision: false
  # port_forwards:
  #   - guest: '80'
  #     host: '8080'
  #   - guest: '443'
  #     host: '4433'

Provisioning

If you would like to provision the containers when they startup you will need to set provision: true in the containers.yml.

Spinning up environment

When you are ready to spin up simply:

cd Ubuntu/xenial64
vagrant up

Tearing down environment

When you are all done with your Vagrant environment you can quickly and cleanly tear it all down:

./cleanup.sh

Tips And Tricks

Build images

When spinning up containers the default is to build them each time. Instead of doing this you can simply build each distro image that you choose and then change containers.yml to use the image instead.

For example let's build our custom Ubuntu Xenial image:

cd Ubuntu/xenial64
docker build -t localhost/xenial64-vagrant .

Now change Ubuntu/xenial64/containers.yml to use this new image:

From:

---
- name: 'container0'
  ansible_groups:
    - 'test_nodes'
  build: false
  image: mrlesmithjr/vagrant-containers:xenial64
  provision: false
  # port_forwards:
  #   - guest: '80'
  #     host: '8080'
  #   - guest: '443'
  #     host: '4433'

To:

---
- name: 'container0'
  ansible_groups:
    - 'test_nodes'
  build: false
  image: localhost/xenial64-vagrant
  provision: false
  # port_forwards:
  #   - guest: '80'
  #     host: '8080'
  #   - guest: '443'
  #     host: '4433'

`/etc/hosts`

Updating /etc/hosts on each container spun up for multi-system testing. You may have a need to do some testing with an Ansible role which requires multiple systems and need name resolution working between containers. There is a Vagrant plugin called vagrant-hostmanager but I didn't get the results that I was looking for. So I put together this bit of pre-tasks in the playbook.yml which will take care of this for us. Or you can use this for additional use cases.

---
- hosts: all
  vars:
  pre_tasks:
    - name: Installing Network Related Packages (Alpine)
      apk:
        name: "{{ item }}"
        state: "present"
        update_cache: true
      become: true
      with_items:
        - 'bind-tools'
        - 'iproute2'
        - 'iputils'
      when: ansible_os_family == "Alpine"

    - name: Installing Network Related Packages (Debian)
      apt:
        name: "{{ item }}"
        state: "present"
      become: true
      with_items:
        - 'iproute'
        - 'iputils-ping'
        - 'net-tools'
      when: ansible_os_family == "Debian"

    - name: Installing Network Related Packages (RedHat)
      yum:
        name: "{{ item }}"
        state: "present"
      become: true
      with_items:
        - 'iproute'
        - 'iputils'
        - 'net-tools'
      when: >
            ansible_os_family == "RedHat" and
            ansible_distribution != "Fedora"

# Capturing ip address of eth0 inside container
    - name: Capturing IP
      shell: "ifconfig eth0 | grep 'inet addr' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{print $1}'"
      register: "_ip_address"
      become: true
      changed_when: false

# We use /etc/hosts.tmp to collect our hosts because we cannot directly make
# changes to /etc/hosts
    - name: Checking If /etc/hosts.tmp Exists
      stat:
        path: "/etc/hosts.tmp"
      register: "_etc_host_tmp"

    - name: Creating /etc/hosts.tmp If It Does Not Exist
      file:
        path: "/etc/hosts.tmp"
        state: "touch"
      become: true
      when: not _etc_host_tmp['stat']['exists']

    - name: Updating /etc/hosts.tmp
      lineinfile:
        path: "/etc/hosts.tmp"
        regexp: "^127.0.0.1"
        line: "127.0.0.1 localhost"
      register: "_etc_host_tmp_updated_localhost"
      become: true
      with_items: '{{ play_hosts }}'

    - name: Updating /etc/hosts.tmp
      lineinfile:
        path: "/etc/hosts.tmp"
        regexp: "^{{ hostvars[item]['_ip_address']['stdout'] }}"
        line: "{{ hostvars[item]['_ip_address']['stdout'] }} {{ hostvars[item]['inventory_hostname'] }}"
      register: "_etc_host_tmp_updated"
      become: true
      with_items: '{{ play_hosts }}'

# We do this to overwrite the current /etc/hosts
    - name: Updating /etc/hosts
      shell: "cat /etc/hosts.tmp > /etc/hosts"
      become: true
      when: >
            _etc_host_tmp_updated['changed'] or
            _etc_host_tmp_updated_localhost['changed']
  roles:
  tasks:
    - name: Update Apt-Cache
      apt:
        update_cache: true
        cache_valid_time: 3600
      become: true
      when: ansible_os_family == "Debian"

License

MIT

Author Information

Larry Smith Jr.

@mrlesmithjr
EverythingShouldBeVirtual
mrlesmithjr [at] gmail.com