BanzaiMan / travis-packer

Files you need to create Vagrant boxes for use with travis-cookbooks

travis-packer

Files you need to create Vagrant boxes for use with travis-cookbooks

In order to develop for travis-cookbooks, a local development is useful. While it is possible to use the local machine for this, a virtual machine is desirable.

This repository contains a useful script to make it easier to provision a VM for travis-cookbooks development.

Requirements

1. Packer
2. Vagrant
3. At least one of VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion (for OS X) or VMWare Workstation (for Windows and Linux), or Parallels Desktop (for OS X).

Usage

1. Clone this, bento and travis-cookbooks in the same directory.
2. Change directory to travis-packer.
3. Install Active Support:

bundle install

1. Run bundle exec ./generate. This prints to STDOUT the JSON document that is suitable for use by Packer. Save it in ../bento:

bundle exec ./generate > ../bento/ubuntu-12.04-amd64-travis.json

1. Move to ../bento.
2. It seems that in the first packer build, the system_info cookbook appears to hang. It should be removed from the JSON template.

vi ubuntu-12.04-amd64-travis.json

1. Build the base "standard" image. This could take a while, depending on the resources available to the VM.

packer build -parallel=false [-only=vmware-iso] ubuntu-12.04-amd64-travis.json

1. Add the resulting Vagrant box as travis-precise:

vagrant box add --name travis-precise ../builds/vmware/travis_ubuntu-12.04_chef-latest.box

1. In the travis-cookbooks directory, run the rest of language-specific cookbooks:

vagrant up ruby-precise

Hints

Build times

The generated packer template allocates 2 GB of memory and 2 CPUs to the VM while provisioning the base Vagrant box. If your host machine has enough resources, you can allocate more. The resource allocation is defined near vboxmanage, vmx_data and prlctl.

Unless you have a giant host machine to build the VMs, -parallel=false is strongly advised.

You can also pass -only flag to limit boxes to build.

Building Trusty boxes

By default, ./generate reads definitions given by Bento's Ubuntu 12.04 on x86_64 (i.e., amd64) template. It has also been tested for use with Ubuntu 14.04. You can generate this with:

./generate 14.04

You can then develop cookbooks for Travis CI's next generation images.

While theoretically possible, other operating systems and architectures (notably x86) are not supported. (There is no plan to support them on Travis CI.)

Cookbooks layout

The worker image cookbooks in travis-cookbooks are divided into two categories (though there is a small overlap).

1. Ones that run on the standard image (which packer build command executes)
2. Ones that run on each language image (which vagrant up LANGUAGE-precise command executes)

You can look at https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-cookbooks/tree/master/vm_templates which cookbooks runs where.