Vagrant / VirtualBox build

[psychemedia]

Although Virtualbox is likely to give similar issues (eg wrt virtualisation support on Windows) as Docker, there may be a requirement to provide an environment via a fully blown VM.

The Vagrantfile.build file constructs a Virtualbox VM using as much as the repo2docker config files as possible. The Vagrantfile.student file should pull the box from the VagrantCloud and let you run it.

Quick demo:
 
Download and install VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org/
 
 
Download and install vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
 
Create a new dir (eg tm129roboticsTest)
 
Using the Vagrantfile.student file, renamed as Vagrantfile, in that dir
 
On the commandline / terminal, cd into that directory and run: vagrant up
 
Wait.
 
Go to localhost:12980 or 127.0.0.1:12980
 
You shouldn't be asked for a pwd/token but if you are: tm129
 
I need to do another pass, and eg seed it with some test / demo files.
 
You should also see a notebooks/ dir is created at eg tm129roboticsTest/notebooks
 
If you create notebooks in the notebook browser UI you should see them in shared folder
 
If you put files in the notebooks/ dir on host you should see them in VM.

One issue with the build Vagrantfile is that if there are comments or blank lines etc in the apt.txt file, things break:

cat $BINDERBUILDDIR/apt.txt | xargs apt-get -y install

I really need a linux pipeline that will take the apt.txt file, strip out empty lines, strip out comments, comment lines and extraneous white space, and then install the resulting cleaned package names.

[psychemedia]

Related: this looks like it could be usefully generic? https://github.com/manics/repo2shellscript