Description

Oh-My-Box is a set of Packer templates, Ansible playbooks and Shell scripts which can be used to prepare a bunch of Vagrant and Docker boxes/images (based on a minimal GNU/Linux images). Oh-My-Box uses Packer and Vagrant/Docker tools to:

• Download a minimal image
• Create a virtualbox machine or a docker container
• Provision it using Ansible
• Package the VM to a new Vagrant box (commit the container is the plateform is Docker)
• Add the new created box/image to the Vagrant/Docker local repository

Requirements

• Virtualbox (tested with 5.0)
• Packer ( >= v0.8.6 )
• Vagrant ( >= v1.7 )
• Docker ( >= v1.10 )

Test case

The created boxes/images can be used, for example, to develop and test Ansible roles on different GNU/Linux distributions. Yes, Ansible roles compatibility matters ! For instance, the idea may be to prepare a basic Vagrant/Docker boxes/images with specific Ansible and Ruby versions which can be used, for example, to run acceptance tests against the Ansible role using test-kitchen:

• Create a virtualbox machine or a docker container
• Install the Ansible role to be tested
• Run Ansible to provision the target environment
• Run all acceptance tests (using serverspec for instance)

To activate Ruby installation, set the Ansible variable install_ruby to yes within the Packer template that corresponds to the GNU/Linux image you want to provision:

...
{
  "type": "ansible-local",
  "playbook_file": "ansible/provision.yml",
  "role_paths": [
    "ansible/roles/init"
  ],
  "extra_arguments": [
    "--extra-vars='{\"install_ruby\":\"yes\"}'"
  ]
},
...

Usage

If the Vagrant boxes or the Docker images you want to use exist already in the Vagrant Cloud or in the official Dockerhub registry, just run the script oh-my-box.sh which gets their names from the script arguments and checks them out.

Otherwise, if the boxes/images list didn't exist, oh-my-box will create them for you regarding the specified distros names.

$ ./oh-my-box.sh [options]

After provisioning and packaging, the new artifacts (boxes or images) are generated. E.g:

$ vagrant box list

<username>/debian-jessie-ansible
<username>/centos-7.1-ansible

$ docker images --format "table {{.Repository}}\t{{.Tag}}" | awk '$1 ~ /<username>/ { print }'

REPOSITORY                  		TAG
<username>/debian-jessie-ansible	latest
<username>/centos-7.1-ansible		latest

Options

-c, --centos     Prepare a CentOS box
-d, --debian     Prepare a Debian box
-o, --opensuse   Prepare an OpenSUSE box
-s, --sles       Prepare a SLES box
-u, --ubuntu     Prepare a Ubuntu box
-p, --platform   [vagrant|docker]
                 Prepare a box/image for Vagrant or Docker tools
-x, --clean      Remove basic vagrant box after building the new one
-f, --force      Overwrite an existing box
-h, --help       Show this help message and exit

Examples

To create a new Debian box, the default Packer template corresponding to the distro name will be used (see packer/*.json files):

(foobar)$ ./oh-my-box.sh --debian

The above commande will create a new Vagrant box foobar/debian-jessie-ansible using the default script parameters.

Note that we didn't specify the --platform option because by default generated artifact is a Vagrant box. To run multiple builds and remove the generated .boxes files, after they've been added to save disk space, do as follow:

(foobar)$ ./oh-my-box.sh -x --ubuntu=baz/ubuntu-14.04 --debian=baz/debian-8.3
(foobar)$ vagrant box list

baz/debian-8.3-ansible      (virtualbox, 0)
baz/ubuntu-14.04-ansible    (virtualbox, 0)

In the other hand, to build a Docker images for CentOS, you can run the following command:

(foobar)$ ./oh-my-box.sh --platform=docker --centos=centos-7-ansible:0.1
(foobar)$ docker images

REPOSITORY                  TAG
foobar/centos-7-ansible     0.1

Note, in the above command if you didn't mention the image tag 0.1, the tag latest will be used as default.

Author Information

This tool was created in 2015 by Ahmed Bessifi.