How Official Ubuntu Vagrant Boxes Are Built and Published to Atlas

vagrantvirtualbox

Every week or so, a new version of the Official Ubuntu Trusty x64 Vagrant base box for Virtual appears on Hashicorp Atlas:
https://atlas.hashicorp.com/ubuntu/boxes/trusty64

Presumably, for repeatable consistency, this has all been automated.

I know there are general blog posts about how a Vagrant base box can be built but I'm more interested in how these boxes are built. I'm hoping, that like the rest of the Ubuntu ecosystem I've encountered, the process for building these boxes is all public open source.

Update:

I'm specifically interested in the options chosen during the Ubuntu OS installation and any post-OS-install changes that are made before packaging the box.

The details of using Vagrant, Packer, or other tools to package the machine into a box are much less important.

Best Answer

You would be correct that the build process for Ubuntu images is all open!

For 16.04 and newer

Look at the livecd-rootfs package for how the images are built:

For older releases of Ubuntu

Specifically:

https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-on-ec2/vmbuilder/jenkins_kvm

And this is probably what you're looking for:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-on-ec2/vmbuilder/jenkins_kvm/view/head:/jenkins/CloudImages_Vagrant.sh

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Vagrant box for vmware provider

Most of the vagrant boxes are build for virtualBox, because by default, vagrant is configured to use virtualBox as its provider. Moreover virtualBox is free of charge where that isn't the case with other providers. I can't find any good reason on why we should use other providers. I use vagrant for most of my projects both on LAMP and MEAN and using virtualBox without any problems.

Now you want to use vmware, you have to install plugins. You can always build a box from scratch if you don't get one from cloud. But of course, that is a time consuming process. I've published a guide on 'how to setup a ubuntu development environment using vagrant' and in that I have mentioned how to wrap an existing vagrant environment in to a new box. Again, I'm not sure if repackaging is possible for another provider. Please check it out and let us know about it.

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A fix is in progress (originally here), but it has not yet been merged.

In the mean time, the simplest workaround is to create a serial port and redirect it to nowhere:

vm.customize [ "modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "file", File::NULL ]