Vagrant

Vagrant is open-source software for creating and configuring virtual development environments. It can be considered a wrapper around VirtualBox and configuration management software such as Chef, Salt and Puppet. Although written in Ruby, it is usable in other programming projects such as PHP, Python, Java, and C#.

Quick workflow is such:

1. install vagrant package: poldek -u vagrant
2. add your user to vbox group
3. register base box with vagrant box add
4. create Vagrantfile with vagrant init BASEBOXNAME
5. bring up VM defined in Vagrantfile with vagrant up
6. log in to VM with vagrant ssh

The commands are run in dir where is Vagrantfile.

Base box you need to import only once, you can make new VM's without need to import base box again.

glen is providing regularly built vagrant base boxes:

With Vagrant 1.5+ you can also use vagrant cloud urls:

• vagrant box add glen/pld32
• vagrant box add glen/pld64
• vagrant box add glen/pld32-th2012
• vagrant box add glen/pld32-th2013

the .box is actually importable by plain VirtualBox as well if you rename the file as .ova, on ftp there are symlinks for .ova files made for convenience.

After box is up, you probably want to provision it or install packages with poldek directly. Also quite common is to grow a disk

To install chef-solo do poldek -u chef, if you want to run chef server inside that box, have look at chef-server.

If you are using chef-client, it's recommended to install vagrant-butcher plugin to automatically delete node when destroying VM:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-butcher

If using older Vagrant (< 1.5), you need older butcher plugin:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-butcher --plugin-version=2.0.0

I (glen) needed to give someone VM image containing desktop application, as a result there's PLD Linux with MATE Desktop Vagrantfile which you can use to create same image from scratch.