Vagrant Box Workstation Builds

This project holds the Packer build configurations for linux desktop environments. Each box builds a workstation to use with Vagrant.

All boxes are public, available builds:

• benchoncy/ubuntu-2004-desktop-workstation
• benchoncy/fedora-34-desktop-workstation

Prerequisites

In order to run any builds, the following software must be first installed:

• Ansible
• VirtualBox
• Packer
• Vagrant

Build

Ensure all required prerequisites are installed, then a build can be run using:

ansible-playbook build-boxes.yml

To build requires a vagrant cloud token, this can be specified through the environnement variable VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN or passed through the --extra-vars flag, see section on variables for more.

Tags

The ansible playbook is tagged to help with controlling the flow of execution. available tags are listed below.

Example:

ansible-playbook build-boxes.yml --tags "version_check"

Tag	Note
version_check	Runs extra tasks to output the new version to be created.
debug	Enable debug tasks, includes version_check
clean	Clean up steps, these run by default

Variables

Below is a list of variables which can be passed to ansible through the --extra-vars flag.

Example:

ansible-playbook build-boxes.yml --extra-vars "next_version_type=patch"

Variable	Note
next_version_type	Specifies what order of magnitude the next version should be, possible values include major, minor or patch. defaults to minor.
vagrant_cloud_token	vagrant_cloud_token is the vagrant cloud token to authenticate for permission to upload boxes. If vagrant_cloud_token is not specified packer will look for the VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN environnement variable.
boxes	Defaults to all boxes, can be used to specify a different list to build.
org	Defaults to benchoncy, can be used to specify a different organisation on vagrant cloud to upload to.

Testing

Running packer manually

For testing and development the below command can be used to run packer directly while only outputting boxes to a local directory.

packer build -force -only='*<TARGET_BOX>' -except='vagrant-cloud' box-config.pkr.hcl

Once packer is complete, you can navigate to box-files/<TARGET_BOX>/ and run vagrant up to run the local box in vagrant.

NOTE: Vagrant will boot the virtualbox vm with 4 cores and 8gb of RAM, if you do not have this available edit the Vagrantfile accordingly.

Packer variables

The follwing variables can be passed to packer build using the -var flag:

Variable	Note
version	(vagrant-cloud only) Specifies the resulting build version tag.
cloud_token	(vagrant-cloud only) cloud_token is the vagrant cloud token to authenticate for permission to upload boxes. If cloud_token is not specified packer will look for the VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN environnement variable.
org	(vagrant-cloud only) Defaults to benchoncy, can be used to specify a different organisation on vagrant cloud to upload to.