Build a Base Box with Vagrant and PuppetWildchief

Introduction

If you want to create your own Vagrant Base Box using an Oracle Virtualbox as the vagrant provider, you can and it is fairly straight forward. I have detailed the steps in this post. I am using Windows 7 as my “host” operating system on my laptop and I am going to build a Centos 6 base box for my Vagrant template.

I am also going to use the popular configuration management tool puppet to deploy customisations to my Vagrant boxes. In this case I am going to complete a really simple change and add a user called “jenkins”

Let’s get started:

Ensure you have Virtual Box Installed

Vagrant alone doesn’t provide and virtualisation capabilities, it is simply a very useful tool for provisioning VM guests is a quick and standard manner. We will need to provide some type of hypervisor to run our virtual guests. In this example we are going to use the Oracle Virtual Box 4.3.20. It is free, so go ahead and install.

Ensure you have Vagrant installed

Install Guest Additions

This is an important part of the process if you are planning to use Puppet to provision your build which I am. This provides the shared folders capability for accessing the puppet configuration on the host operating system which we will cover later in this guide.

Once your machine is built then ensure the guest additions are installed. There is a useful guide to this here these are the steps I followed

Ensure the Virtual Machine Additions install CD is mounted.

Select your virtual machine, select show. This will bring up a Virtual machine “console”
Choose Devices and “Insert Guest Additions CD image”

Prepare the Vagrant default file

Now you have a a vagrant box to use as a template we can set about creating our vagrant file.

From the c:\myvagrant folder, type the command
vagrant init
This will initialize the directory and create a default vagrant file.

c:\myvagrant\vagrant

Set Up Puppet

Tp have pupet finish off your vagrant builds we need to create some puppet configuration. So lets do that.

Create a manifests folder

We are going to create a folder where we can hold our puppet configuration. So to do that we need to create a folder under the c:\myvagrant folder called manifests. Go ahead and do that.

Setup a Puppet Manifest File “default.pp”

In this example we are going to use puppet to add a new user to our vm. This user will be named jenkins and will have a home directory of /home/jenkins. Pretty standard stuff but enough to illustrate how to use puppet on a vagrant deployment.

Under the manifests folder, create a file called default.pp and enter the following puppet directives

user {'jenkins': name => 'jenkins', comment => 'Jenkins Service Account', managehome => true, }

package {'java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel': ensure => "installed" }
now you we have a vagrant layout that resembles something like this:

Nearly There: Create our vagrant file

The default vagrant file needs to be replaced with our own one. So open the c:\vagrant\vagrant file and replace the text within with the following text:

# -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby :


# Vagrantfile API/syntax version. Don't touch unless you know what you're doing!

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|

  # tell vagrant which base box we want to use (the one we just created)

  config.vm.box = "C:/vagrant/boxes/Centos6-Base.box"
  #Set a custom O/S hostname (not the default localhost)

  config.vm.hostname = "centosclean"
  #Set some virtual settings

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|

	v.cpus = 2

	v.gui = true

	v.memory = 1024

	v.name = "centosclean"

    end

  #Install Puppet
$script = <

Build a Base Box for Vagrant and Puppet deployment

Introduction

Ensure you have Virtual Box Installed

Ensure you have Vagrant installed

Create the base image in Oracle VirtualBox

Install Guest Additions

Ensure the Virtual Machine Additions install CD is mounted.

Add the Prequisites for CentOS 6

Add a Vagrant User

Grant the vagrant user full rights with sudoers

Add the Vagrant Guest SSH Key

Remove the TTY Requirement

Convert this VM Guest to a Vagrant “box”

Prepare the Vagrant default file

Set Up Puppet

Create a manifests folder

Setup a Puppet Manifest File “default.pp”

Nearly There: Create our vagrant file