Virtual machine for your development environment

Tested against

• Host: MacOS Sierra 10.12.3
• Virtualization Providers: VirtualBox 5.1.14, VMware Fusion 7.1.3
• Packer^ ~> 0.12.2
• Vagrant ~> 1.9.1

(^) Packer is required to build the custom Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 LTS image.

Installation

Notes

1. sets the virtual machine to use Europe/London (aka GMT) as your time zone (in packer/preseed/preseed.cfg)
2. defaults to an admin user, vagrant (in packer/template.json)
3. applies no password in sudoers for vagrant user (in packer/provisioning/sudoers.sh)
4. in Ubuntu 16.04, disables systemd's PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames to work with vagrant (in packer/provisioning/networking_fix.sh)

You can switch from systemd to Upstart on Ubuntu 16.04 by performing the following commands:

sudo apt-get install upstart-sysv
sudo update-initramfs -u

Default hardware settings (adjust variables as necessary)

cp packer/template.json.example packer/template.json

Note: packer/template.json.example is based on Packer 0.6.0.

• cpu_cores: 4 cores
• memory: 4096 MB
• disk_size: 20140 MB

Vagrantfile

• Run cp Vagrantfile.example Vagrantfile or create and define your own.
• Configure and uncomment recipes that you want to cook.
• Optionally create your own recipes and place in the cookbooks/custom directory

One line install command

When you're ready, run the following depending on your target virtualization provider:

rake virtualbox:build_and_provision
rake vmware:build_and_provision

Commonly used vagrant commands

  vagrant up        # starts vagrant
  vagrant provision # provisions vm (without restarting)
  vagrant ssh       # SSH into vagrant
  vagrant reload    # restarts vagrant
  vagrant halt      # stops vagrant
  vagrant status    # check to see if vm is running

Running IntelliJ and other X11 apps

On your virtual machine, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add the following:

X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10
X11UseLocalhost yes

Restart the ssh service. Your host machine will need an X11 client. For example, on MacOS, you can use XQuartz. Then simply run from your terminal:

vagrant ssh -- -X

The X flag enables X11 forwarding for the SSH session. Inside your virtual machine, run the idea.sh script from the IntelliJ directory and it should launch an XQuartz instance automagically on your host.

Gotchas

1. If your vm cannot connect to the internet (this typically happens when you switch from one network to another on a VirtualBox vm), run this command:

sudo dhclient

2. You received the message: "Error creating VM: VBoxManage error: VBoxManage: error: Machine settings file <path_to_vbox> already exists". Installation was left in a bad state. Open VirtualBox, stop and remove the existing VM. Delete this vbox in your VirtualBox directory and re-run the command that failed.

3. On VMware, if HGFS kernel module could not be found, you'll need to re-install VMwareTools. Follow the instructions in the README.

4. You received the message: "Shared folders that Chef requires are missing on the virtual machine. This is usually due to configuration changing after already booting the machine. The fix is to run a vagrant reload so that the proper shared folders will be prepared and mounted on the VM." Read the workaround solution here.

Credits

Some things taken from boxcutter/ubuntu repo. Thanks guys!