Freebsd on Vagrant
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
I love FreeBSD but it's a lot of work to get it running correctly on Vagrant. That's a shame, because more people should experience the quality of FreeBSD, the convenience of jails and a modern filesystem like ZFS.
Well, now you can! With this Vagrant box you get a fully tuned, latest FreeBSD with ZFS by copying a single file.
Table of Contents
Quickstart
Simply copy the Vagrantfile from this repository to the project you want to run the VM from and you are done. The box will be downloaded for you.
Create your own FreeBSD Box
This is for people who want to have their own customized box, instead of the box I made for you with the scripts in this repository.
The FreeBSD boxse are build from the excellent mfsBSD site, namely the 9.2-RELEASE-amd64 special edition ISO's. Download this ISO and create a new virtual machine.
Virtualbox Settings
Your virtualbox works best with the following settings:
- System -> Motherboard -> Hardware clock in UTC time
- System -> Acceleration -> VT/x/AMD-V
- System -> Acceleration -> Enable Nested Paging
- Storage -> Attach a .vdi disk (this one we can minimize later)
- Network -> Adapter 1 -> Advanced -> Adapter Type -> Paravirtualized Network (virtio-net)
- Network -> Adapter 2 -> Advanced -> Attached to -> Host-Only Adapter
- Network -> Adapter 2 -> Advanced -> Adapter Type -> Paravirtualized Network (virtio-net)
I would also recommend to disable all the things you are not using, such as audio and usb.
Installation from msfBSD ISO
Attach the ISO as a CD and boot it. You can login with root and password
mfsroot. After logging in, start the base installation with:
mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0 /cdrom
zfsinstall -d /dev/ada0 -u /cdrom/9.2-RELEAE-amd64 -s 1G
When the installation is done, you can poweroff and remove the CD from
boot order in the settings.
Configuration
Boot into your clean FreeBSD installation. You can now run the
vagrant-installation.sh script from this repository. This will install and
setup everything which is needed for Vagrant to run. First, login as root (no
password required).
Select your keyboard:
kbdmap
Get an IP adress:
dhclient vtnet0
In your FreeBSD box, fetch the installation script:
fetch --no-verify-peer -o /tmp/vagrant-setup.sh https://raw.github.com/wunki/vagrant-freebsd/master/bin/vagrant-setup.sh
Run it:
cd /tmp
chmod +x vagrant-setup.sh
./vagrant-setup.sh
Package for Vagrant
Before packaging, I would recommend trying to reduce the size of the disk a bit more. In Linux you can do:
VBoxManage modifyvdi <freebsd-virtual-machine>.vdi compact
You can now package the box by running the following on your local machine:
vagrant package --base <name-of-your-virtual-machine> --output <name-of-your-box>
What's Next?
You can find the TODO's in the TODO.org at the root of this repository.
Credits
I got lots of useful configuration from xironix freebsd builds.
License
The above is released under the BSD license -- who would have thought! Meaning, do whatever you want, but I would sure appreciate if you contribute any improvements back to this repository.