Self-contained build environments with Vagrant

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Vagrant is a nifty piece of Ruby software that lets you set up Virtual Machines with an unparalleled amount of automation. It interfaces with a VM provider like VirtualBox, and helps you set up and tear down VM’s as you need them. I like it better than Juju because there isn’t as much hand-holding involved, and I like it better than vanilla Puppet because I don’t regularly deploy a thousand VM’s at a time. At the Daily Cal, I’ve used Vagrant to help developers set up their own build environments for our software where they can write code and test features in isolation. I also use it as a general-purpose VM manager on my home file server, so I can build and test server software in a sandbox.

You can run Vagrant on your laptop, but I think that it’s the wrong piece of hardware for the job. Long-running VM batch jobs and build environment VM’s should be run by headless servers, where you don’t have to worry about excessive heat, power consumption, huge amounts of I/O, and keeping your laptop on so it doesn’t suspend. My server at home is set up with:

  • 1000GB of disk space backed by RAID1
  • Loud 3000RPM fans I bought off a Chinese guy four years ago
  • Repurposed consumer-grade CPU and memory (4GB) from an old desktop PC

You don’t need great hardware to run a couple of Linux VM’s. Since my server is basically hidden in the corner, the noisy fans are not a problem and actually do a great job of keeping everything cool under load. RAID mirroring (I’m hoping) will provide high availability, and since the server’s data is easily replaceable, I don’t need to worry about backups. Setting up your own server is usually cheaper than persistent storage on public clouds like AWS, but your mileage may vary.

Vagrant configuration is a single Ruby file named Vagrantfile in the working directory of your vagrant process. My basic Vagrantfile just sets up a virtual machine with Vagrant’s preconfigured Ubuntu 12.04LTS image. They offer other preconfigured images, but this is what I’m most familiar with.

# Vagrantfile

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # Every Vagrant virtual environment requires a box to build off of.
  config.vm.box = "precise32"

  # The url from where the 'config.vm.box' box will be fetched if it
  # doesn't already exist on the user's system.
  config.vm.box_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box"

  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 8080, host: 8080

  # Enable public network access from the VM. This is required so that
  # the machine can access the Internet and download required packages.
  config.vm.network :public_network

end

For long-running batch jobs, I like keeping a CPU Execution Cap on my VM’s so that they don’t overwork the system. The cap keeps the temperature down and prevents the VM from interfering with other server processes. You can add an execution cap (for VirtualBox only) by appending the following before the end of your primary configuration block:

# Adding a CPU Execution Cap

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

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
    v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--cpuexecutioncap", "40"]
  end

end

After setting up Vagrant’s configuration, create a new directory containing only the Vagrantfile and run vagrant up to set up the VM. Other useful commands include:

  • vagrant ssh — Opens a shell session to the VM
  • vagrant halt — Halts the VM gracefully (Vagrant will connect via SSH)
  • vagrant status — Checks the current status of the VM
  • vagrant destroy — Destroys the VM

Finally, to set up the build environment automatically every time you create a new Vagrant VM, you can write provisioners. Vagrant supports complex provisioning frameworks like Puppet and Chef, but you can also write a provisioner that’s just a shell script. To do so, add the following inside your Vagrantfile:

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

  config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "bootstrap.sh"
end

Then just stick your provisioner next to your Vagrantfile, and it will execute every time you start your VM. You can write commands to fetch package lists and upgrade system software, or to install build dependencies and check out source code. By default, Vagrant’s current working directory is also mounted on the VM guest as a folder named vagrant in the file system root. You can refer to other provisioner dependencies this way.

Vagrant uses a single public/private keypair for all of its default images. The private key can usually be found in your home directory as ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key. You can add it to your ssh-agent and open your own SSH connections to your VM without Vagrant’s help.

Even if you accidentally mess up your Vagrant configuration, you can use VirtualBox’s built-in command-line tools to fix boot configuration issues or ssh daemon issues.

$ VBoxManage list vms
...
$ VBoxManage controlvm <name|uuid> pause|reset|poweroff|etc
...
$ VBoxHeadless -startvm <name|uuid> --vnc
...
(connect via VNC)

The great thing about Vagrant’s VM-provider abstraction layer is that you can grab the VM images from VirtualBox and boot them on another server with VirtualBox installed, without Vagrant completely. Vagrant is a excellent support tool for programmers (and combined with SSH tunneling, it is great for web developers as well). If you don’t already have support from some sort of VM infrastructure, you should into possibilities with Vagrant.