Base Boxes

Useful base box creation capabilities using Packer for Fraedom contributors. At this time base boxes can be created for use with Vagrant on VirtualBox and Hyper-V use. The main purpose of these base boxes is to enable rapid development on a local environment. These boxes will be orchestrated along with provisioning pipelines to create useful local environments. Fraedom default security, box hardening and standard environment applications should be added at this level in the infrastructure pipeline.

This repository is unlikely to have many contributors as most Fraedom contributors will be consumers of its output rather than direct contributors. It is intended that a CI Server will be the main user of this repository to create artifacts that downstream consumers can access. As such the expectation is that the CI build will provide Vagrant boxes for consumption - at this time supporting the VirtualBox provider and Hyper-V provider usage.

This repository favours VirtualBox for building base boxes due to Packer not supporting Hyper-V out of the box.

Software Dependencies

The following dependencies need to be installed on the machine used to build the base boxes. At this time VirtualBox does not support nested virtualization so the recommended way to build boxes is to have these installed on bare metal. The versions in brackets below are those that have been tested at this time. That is not to say other versions will not work, but at this time we are not supporting other versions.

• Packer (0.8.6)
• VirtualBox (5.0.10 r104061)
• Vagrant (1.7.4)
• psake (4.4.2)

These dependencies can be installed using Chocolatey. The init.bat script will install the latest version if none is found on the machine it is run on.

Quick Start

For more detailed information see the full documentation....

Ensure You Have Installed All The Software Dependencies

The quickest way to install all the dependencies is to run the init.bat script. This will use Chocolatey to install the Software Dependencies. It will install the following versions of the Software Dependencies at this time using Chocolatey.

• Packer (0.8.6)
• VirtualBox (5.0.10 r104061)
• Vagrant (1.7.4)
• psake (4.4.2)

If you have any of these installed at this time and don't want to install these versions then you should edit the init.bat script before running it.

Download An Appropriate ISO

Details of ISO requirements can be found here including download instructions. For this Quick Start download the Windows 8.1 Enterprise with Updates (x64) ISO from the shared Development drive folder located at U:/Dev Environment/MSDN/Windows 8.1/.

Build Your First Base Box

Once you have an appropriate ISO downloaded to the iso folder you are ready to build your first box.

PACKER_LOG=1 packer build -force -machine-readable win81x64-enterprise.json

This will start the build of your base box. Once this is complete a box file will appear in your box folder.

Import your Box into Vagrant

To use your box you need to import it into Vagrant. In the test folder is a metadata.json file that should be used for this purpose. It has a link to the box and appropriate checksum. It also supplies a version of the box so that updates can be implemented in a Vagrant native way. To import the box issue the following command from within the test folder:

vagrant box add --force metadata.json

Once the box is imported if you issue the command vagrant box list -i you should see the following box listed

fraedom/dev-box  (virtualbox, 0.1.0)

Start your Box

Now you have a box ready for use by vagrant. In the directory you would like to initialise your box (not usually in the repository!) run the following command:

vagrant init fraedom/dev-box

This will provide a Vagrantfile that will delegate all control to the Vagrantfile baked into the box at build time. Now to run the machine:

vagrant up

Contributor Documentation

This repository will require the maintenance of base boxes. New boxes will need to be added and defunct use case boxes removed from this repository. Contributors should consult the (TODO - Contributors file) documentation. The main contributor operations have been outlined below. In depth documentation can be found on the relevant wiki pages.

• Updating the generated box SHA values
• Building a single box
• Adding a new base box
• Updating base dependencies
• TODO ...

Packer and Hyper-V

At this time Packer does not have a supported Hyper-V builder. A pull request exists to introduce this capability. Until it is merged the recommendation from Mitchell Hashimoto (Creator of Packer) is to pull the PR and compile it into a Packer release. During testing of this repository the proposed method did not prove successful so an alternative implementation for Hyper-V was implemented at this time. It is recommended that once the Hyper-V builder becomes available in the general Packer release package that this repository is refactored to utilise this method.

A repository exists to build Packer with the Hyper-V pull request in a Docker container psellars-fraedom/packer-hyperv-build for those interested in testing this process.

TO-DO

• Make metadata file more appropriate to base box nature - currently represent a consumer view!
• Quick Start - In Git Bash/Powershell are different....Document appropriately
• Provide a pipeline template for automated build, import and initialization of boxes
  • Add artifact push to CI pipeline build
• Document how to change the Chocolatey version checked for and installed
• Document how to change the init.bat script to install different versions of the Software Dependencies
• Update box build scripts to install from internal repository (at this time external downloads)
• Implement Hyper-V build provisioner
  • Review Hyper-V build process when Packer supports them
• Fail build if import box SHA check fails