It would be nice to have an official box to be used with something like Vagrant in order to prepare/test some provisioning scripts.

Just use one of the ones here:

- http://www.vagrantbox.es/

Get the same distribution and you'll be fine.

-Tim

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'If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.' //Edsger Dijkstra
'Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.' | 'Do things that have never been done.' //Russell Kirsch

Hi, thanks for the answer but that won't do.

Only Ubuntu offers 'official' boxes but are vanilla boxes.
Maybe I would like in the future to create my own image and deploy that... I rather use something tested as base rather than a box from 'John Doe' uploaded on Dropbox.

I'm quite sure it's not that hard to automate the process of creating these boxes and it would offer a great advantage over many VPS suppliers as people can prepare (almost) offline a deployment or test provisioners.

What does vagrant do that you think you need? I still don't get vagrant's use case. Why not build a VM file that contains what you want and then ... distribute it to the other developers. I've run the same VMware and VirtualBox disks on Windows and Linux successfully.

It allows for very rapid (and fully automated) start-up and tear-down of VMs. That's what I use it for. For instance, we distribute our software in custom deb packages, and I have scripts that build these packages for each new release. I want to ensure a "clean" system for each package build, so I use vagrant to spin up a vanilla base image, and then use vagrant's shell provisioner to install dependencies and run the package build script.

Sure, you *could* do this pointy-clicky style directly in Virtualbox, but that's quite clumsy.

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>> I want to ensure a "clean" system for each package build

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format

"The OVF standard is not tied to any particular hypervisor or processor architecture. The unit of packaging and distribution is a so-called OVF Package which may contain one or more virtual systems each of which can be deployed to a virtual machine."

"... VMware, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and XenSource submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) a proposal for OVF, then named "Open Virtual Machine Format""

"The entire directory can be distributed as an OVA package, which is a tar archive file with the OVF directory inside."

But hey, if you need something on top of that coercing each and every member of the team to sit and wait for the VM to be built and hoping that it meaning vagrant works identically on each VM platform...more power to you.

Blah blah blah. I know OVA/OVF all too well, and though it's the closest thing we have to a "standard", it's not anywhere close to a seamless process to move VMs between hypervisors.



The packages aren't built by humans - they're built by a CI server, so I don't really care if it takes 5 extra minutes to build a package.

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Been using CI for years, good idea. I installed and tried vagrant. It just didn't seem to add enough to bother with yet another API.

jebblue, passing around a 1gb file as the 'official replica of the production environment' sounds a bit inconvenient.
And soon enough we'll get to an architecture where we have 3 separate servers, one for message queues, one gearman and one the application.

It's good ot have the process of deploying a new server re-tested by each developer.

If there will be the case of having custom packages that need to be installed we can create an image internally and have that as a base box for Vagrant.
For developers it would still be just a matter of executing `vagrant up` in console.

the-noob if I needed to constantly modify the virtual machine image and send it to others then I'd probably start using something like vagrant. Since that's not a normal use case from my experience, making one and distributing it once is sufficient. It sounds like you guys are making lots of mods to the image profile so I can see where you'd need vagrant. In all the places I've worked, I've never heard of anyone else doing that.

Ah I just ran vagrant init and checked out Vagrantfile, now I remember one reason why it turned me off. The Vagrant file isn't just a plain stanza file, it's Ruby. Barf.

Let's try vagrant up for giggles, I did nothing wrong, it's already barking at me:

"[default] The guest additions on this VM do not match the install version of
VirtualBox!"

"SSH authentication failed! This is typically caused by the public/private
keypair for the SSH user not being properly set on the guest VM."

Huh? I just brought the dang thing up and already the guest additions are outdated and ssh is failing. I didn't even try to ssh in yet?

Is it running? Run a ps. Nope. How about "ps -ef". I see a vboxheadless running so yep I guess it's running. Except for the ssh error maybe I'll try to log in. How? Maybe run vagrant and it will tell me. Ah vagrant status, I'll remember that for next time.

There's a vagrant ssh command! Cool, but it asks for me to enter a password? For the vagrant user? Hmm, no idea what the password is, I'm blocked.

See what I mean?

Ok let's stop it, redo the config, that config file was from a couple months ago when I was playing with vagrant.

vagrant halt

"<the ssh error again>"

I can't stop it!!?!? Guess I'll have to kill -HUP it. Whew that worked!

Now rm the Vagrant file and try again, oops, there's a hidden .vagrant directory that will cause issues so rm it too.

Still complaining. Ok let's do the steps here: http://docs-v1.vagrantup.com/v1/docs/base_boxes.html

Hold it, those instructions might be old, go to the base web site and get started again from there: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/getting-started/index.html

<elevator music while one of those image files gets downloaded, 30%, 40%, 50%, etc....>

<thinking, who made this image? I didn't, can I trust it? IDK, the people who like vagrant said I should do this so it might be OK>

OK it's done and then it starts it up...

Dang it! I got the same ssh error and the same guest additions error. Oh well, the instructions say to run vagrant ssh. It asks me for the vagrant user password again which I don't have.

OK, time to play some Minecraft.

If Minecraft helps you in development then, by all means, go ahead and play !

I'm certain your experiences installing linux were always flawless, you never had a package that misbehaved or throwed, yup yup.
Now let me give you another real world example. We're doing a lot of testing (NodeJS, Redis, ZeroMQ, PHP 5.5, PHP 5.4, etc...) and for each we want a clean base box.
Obviously those proof of concepts have to be reproducible.
So instead of wasting tens of GB on VM storage I rather have a git repository with a few config files that recreate a VM when needed.


Well, guess what? That's the exact thing that I'm asking here... official images from Linode so that I don't have to wonder who made them and if they are secure.

Vagrant is quite 'young' and just getting traction and attention so the quality should improve.
If you don't like it then don't use it.
I don't see the point of hijacking my thread just to complain and bash something into which you have no interest.

You assume just making these images is easy, and that there aren't more important things to do. If it's so easy, why don't you do it? Why not be a good member of the FOSS community? If you don't feel there are Vagrant images that can be trusted, then start building images that can be trusted. Include package lists, how things were configured, and checksums of the image files to ensure they weren't tampered with. If what you are experiencing is such a problem, if you do it right I'm sure you'll be welcomed with open arms.

That may be a bit over dramatic...

I personally use Vagrant at work, but in my opinion it wouldn't make sense to spend engineering time on Vagrant boxes. Not much money to be made there.

_________________
'If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.' //Edsger Dijkstra
'Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.' | 'Do things that have never been done.' //Russell Kirsch

Internet hiccup caused a double post.

Although my sysadmin skills are close to 0 I might give it a try, I found a tutorial on how to create a base box after installing it normally with VirtualBox.
Then my question is how do I get the official image(s) from which Linode VM's are created ?
How do I get notifications when those images are updated?

Wouldn't stackscripts be more useful here?