Java Developer VM Example

A minimal example / template project for a Chef-managed Java developer VM, based on the linux-developer-vm.

It consists of two main parts:

the update-vm.sh script, which makes sure that ChefDK is installed, triggers the Chef run for updating the VM, and verifies the VM using a suite of Serverspec tests.
the cookbooks/vm cookbook, which contains the recipes to be applied to the VM and the tests that come along with it.

Prerequisites

As a developer using the final product (i.e. the resulting developer VM) you only need a VM host like VirtualBox installed.

As the guy who will be building and customizing the initial developer VM package you will additionally need Vagrant installed.

The Java Developer VM is based on Ubuntu 14.04 and includes:

It also includes the ChefDK so it can be updated from within the VM.

In short:

First, you bring up an isolated VM for testing your changes:

$ vagrant up

Now it gets a bit more Cheffy. The typical tasks are:

add a new recipe to cookbooks/vm/recipes
include it in the default.rb recipe
if you want to reuse existing cookbooks from the supermarket, add the dependencies to cookbooks/vm/metadata.rb so that Berkshelf can resolve it
for whatever you do, add a test in cookbooks/vm/spec/integration

Once you have added some Chef recipes, provision the VM to see it in effect:

$ vagrant provision

Note: you may need to login and logout for some settings to take effect.

Whenever something is done:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "added awesome new tool to our developer VM"

Now rinse and repeat until you have a first version of your customized developer VM ready.

Whenever you have a state ready enough for distributing it to your developers, you can package / export it as a VirtualBox image.

First, start from a clean state:

$ vagrant destroy -f
$ vagrant up

Now you have to copy the repository from the shared folder into the VM:

$ vagrant ssh -c "cp -r /vagrant /home/vagrant/vm-setup"

You should also unmount the shared folders now:

$ vagrant ssh -c "sudo umount /vagrant"

Optionally, you may want to clean out the VM for a minimal export image:

$ vagrant ssh -c "wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/boxcutter/ubuntu/master/script/cleanup.sh | sudo bash"

Finally, export the VM as an .ova file:

$ vagrant halt
$ VBoxManage export dev-box --output "dev-box-v0.1.ova" --options manifest,nomacs

As a developer using the VM you typically:

At certain points in time you may want to update the VM:

$ cd /home/vagrant/setup
$ git pull
$ scripts/update-vm.sh

Seems to be too hard to automate for me, so you have to do this manually:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration