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Creating a custom Vagrant box

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vagrant - a person without a settled home or regular work who wanders from place to place and lives by begging.

It is not a common path…

Do not start the creation of a new box from scratch without checking both of these sites:

In 99% of cases, one page will already contain the solution, which is a needed box. Otherwise we have to roll up our sleeves and go through the whole process. This post will contain almost all directions for creating a fresh box.

And last but not least: all recipes provided in this article are valid for Vagrant in version 1.2 and above.

… but sometimes necessary…

Install Vagrant

I’m assuming that you already have Vagrant - if not, go to downloads page or install it by using package manager from your Linux distribution.

Virtual Machine in VirtualBox

At first, we have to prepare a virtual machine with a specified amount of RAM, number of virtual processors, virtual hard disk image and the rest of the virtualized hardware. Remember the VM name - you will need it at the end :wink:.

One important thing related to networking - create only one network adapter and set it for using NAT. At last, setup port forwarding like presented below:

Port forwarding setup for test purposes

Installation

Grab your favourite Linux distribution / Unix flavour ISO image and proceed with the installation process (no Windows because right now Vagrant doesn’t support this operating system as a guest).

This is the easiest step in the whole guide :grin:.

User management

After the installation, create a new user account:

# Create user 'vagrant'.
root> useradd vagrant

# Setup password.
root> passwd vagrant

And add him to proper groups:

root> usermod -aG users,wheel vagrant

And the final step here - disable password for sudo command in the wheel group:

root> visudo

# Uncomment or add a line like below:
%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

SSH

At first open port 22 on your machine, then get this public key and put it in the file:

root> curl https://raw.github.com/.../vagrant.pub > /etc/ssh/authorized_keys
root> chown root:root /etc/ssh/authorized_keys

Then setup your sshd_config file like presented below:

# Uncomment these lines:
Port 22
AddressFamily any
ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
ListenAddress ::
PermitRootLogin yes

# Also uncomment and change these:
AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/authorized_keys
PasswordAuthentication no

Then you can verify your settings by command:

~ $ ssh -i ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key vagrant@localhost -p 2222

If there are no errors you’re ready for the next step.

In some cases you’ll receive an error similar to this one (SELinux compatible tip):

~ $ ssh -i ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key vagrant@localhost -p 2222

Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic)

In this case you need to fix the labels for the file with authorized keys:

~ $ cd /etc/ssh/
~ $ ls -laZ                     # Checking labels.
~ $ restorecon -r -vv .         # Fixing them.

Finishing touches

Unfortunately our sudo has one big disadvantage - it won’t work without a real TTY and as you probably guessed - vagrant doesn’t use it. So we have to disable this setting in sudoers file:

~ $ sudo visudo

# Comment or remove line like below:
Default requiretty

Just before the last step, please remove all previously forwarded ports for your virtual machine in VirtualBox.

Gift packing!

We still have to do the last step - packaging:

~ $ vagrant package --name <VM name> --output FreshAndHotVagrant.box

The result is a finished box, which we can add to our list:

~ $ vagrant box add <internal box name> FreshAndHotVagrant.box

Then feel free to use it inside Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "<internal box name>"
end

Links and Image credits

  1. Original link to Vagrant logo
  2. Vagrant documentation
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