To celebrate the new release of Debian Squeeze at the weekend, I decided to have a quick hack around with setting up a Vagrant base box for it. What I really want to do is build and share a base box for something not entirely unlike RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, which is what our production platform at work uses, but I wanted to get a feel for packaging up base boxes, so I started with something I’m more familiar with.
Anyway, turns out it’s really not that hard. The instructions for creating base boxes are pretty comprehensive. So, without further ado, here we are: Vagrant Base Box for Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” (32-bit). Getting started with it is pretty simple. First of all, make sure you’ve got VirtualBox 4.0 installed, along with Vagrant 0.7.0 or greater. Then all you need to do is:
vagrant box add debian_squeeze_32 \
http://mathie-vagrant-boxes.s3.amazonaws.com/debian_squeeze_32.box
(excuse the formatting, I will fix the code examples on this site one day!) This will take a while to download the box and unpack it in the way that Vagrant likes to do. Finally, let’s just test it out:
mkdir squeeze_demo
cd squeeze_demo
vagrant init debian_squeeze_32
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
which should wind up with you ssh’d into a pristine minimal Debian Squeeze environment, ready to test out its stable goodness.
Changelog
As I update the box, I’ll update the change log here, newest changes at the top.
26th February, 2011
- Updated the permissions on S3 so you can actually download the new version. Sorry, folks!
24th February, 2011
apt-get update && apt-get upgradeto pull in the latest package updates.- Upgraded the VirtualBox Guest Additions from 4.0.2 to 4.0.4.
- Remove the USB controller, since it’s unnecessary.
- Dropped the Grub timeout from 5 seconds to 1, since Vagrant ain’t allowing you to choose an alternative anyway.
7th February, 2011
- Initial release.