Vagrant and Oh-My-Vagrant on RHEL7

My employer keeps paying me, which I appreciate, so it’s good to spend some time to make sure RHEL7 customers get a great developer experience! So here’s how to make vagrant, vagrant-libvirt and Oh-My-Vagrant work on RHEL 7+. The same steps should work for CentOS 7+.

I’ll first paste the commands you need to run, and then I’ll explain what’s happening for those that are interested:

# run these commands, and then get hacking!
# this requires the rhel-7-server-optional-rpms repo enabled
sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms
sudo yum install -y gcc ruby-devel libvirt-devel libvirt qemu-kvm
sudo systemctl start libvirtd.service
wget https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_1.7.4_x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install -y vagrant_1.7.4_x86_64.rpm
vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
wget https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/purpleidea/vagrant-libvirt/repo/epel-7/purpleidea-vagrant-libvirt-epel-7.repo
sudo cp -a purpleidea-vagrant-libvirt-epel-7.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
sudo yum install -y vagrant-libvirt    # noop plugin for oh-my-vagrant dependency
wget https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant/repo/epel-7/purpleidea-oh-my-vagrant-epel-7.repo
sudo cp -a purpleidea-oh-my-vagrant-epel-7.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
sudo yum install -y oh-my-vagrant
. /etc/profile.d/oh-my-vagrant.sh # logout/login or source

Let’s go through it line by line.

sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms

Make sure you have the optional repos enabled, which are needed for the ruby-devel package.

sudo yum install -y gcc ruby-devel libvirt-devel libvirt
sudo systemctl start libvirtd.service

Other than the base os, these are the dependencies you’ll need. If you have some sort of super minimal installation, and find that there is another dependency needed, please let me know and I’ll update this article. Usually libvirt is already installed, and libvirtd is started, but this includes those two operations in case they are needed.

wget https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_1.7.4_x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install -y vagrant_1.7.4_x86_64.rpm

Vagrant has finally landed in Fedora 22, but unfortunately it’s not in RHEL or any of the software collections yet. As a result, we install it from the upstream.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt

Similarly, vagrant-libvirt hasn’t been packaged for RHEL either, so we’ll install it into the users home directory via the vagrant plugin system.

wget https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/purpleidea/vagrant-libvirt/repo/epel-7/purpleidea-vagrant-libvirt-epel-7.repo
sudo cp -a purpleidea-vagrant-libvirt-epel-7.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
sudo yum install -y vagrant-libvirt    # noop plugin for oh-my-vagrant dependency

Since there isn’t a vagrant-libvirt RPM, and because the RPM’s for Oh-My-Vagrant depend on that “requires” to install correctly, I built an empty vagrant-libvirt RPM so that Oh-My-Vagrant thinks the dependency has been met in system wide RPM land, when it’s actually been met in the user specific home directory space. I couldn’t think of a better way to do this, and as a result, you get to read about the exercise that prompted my recent “empty RPM” article.

wget https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant/repo/epel-7/purpleidea-oh-my-vagrant-epel-7.repo
sudo cp -a purpleidea-oh-my-vagrant-epel-7.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
sudo yum install -y oh-my-vagrant

This last part installs Oh-My-Vagrant from the COPR. There is no “dnf enable” command in RHEL, so we manually wget the repo file into place.

. /etc/profile.d/oh-my-vagrant.sh # logout/login or source

Lastly if you’d like to reuse your current terminal session, source the /etc/profile.d/ file that is installed, otherwise close and reopen your terminal.

You’ll need to do an omv init at least once to make sure all the user plugins are installed, and you should be ready for your first vagrant up! Please note, that the above process definitely includes some dirty workarounds until vagrant is more easily consumable in RHEL, but I wanted to get you hacking earlier rather than later!

I hope this article helps you hack it out in RHEL land, be sure to read about how to build your own custom RHEL vagrant boxes too!

Happy Hacking,

James

Making an empty RPM

I am definitely not an RPM expert, in fact, I’m afraid of it, but with recent tools such as COPR, and my glorious Makefile, some aspects of it have become palatable. This post will be about a recent journey I had building the most useless RPM ever.

A video of what my work building this RPM looked like.

A video of my journey building this RPM.

Because of reasons, I wanted to satisfy an RPM dependency for a package that I wanted to install without rebuilding that RPM. As a result, I wanted to build as small an RPM as possible. This took me down a much longer path than I thought it would.

Step 1: The empty spec file

I thought this would be easy. It turns out it was not. Here’s what happened…

james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ cat vagrant-libvirt.spec
%global project_version 0.0.24

Name:       vagrant-libvirt
Version:    0.0.24
Release:    noop
Summary:    A fake vagrant-libvirt RPM
License:    AGPLv3+
BuildArch:  noarch

Requires:   vagrant >= 1.6.5

%description
A fake vagrant-libvirt RPM

%prep
%setup -c -q -T -D -a 0

%build

%install

%files

%changelog
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ rpmbuild -bs vagrant-libvirt.spec 
error: No "Source:" tag in the spec file

Amazingly, rpmbuild fails to build without specifying a Source0 directive. Gah… As an aside, yes the License field was also required, or it won’t build either! So let’s create a dummy RPM to use as the source!

Step 2: The empty tarball

james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ tar -cjf vagrant-libvirt-noop.tar.bz2
tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.

Apparently tar doesn’t want to cooperate either! Maybe these utilities have some sort of ingrained existential fear of nothingness? I can work around this though.

Step 3: The empty file

james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ echo hello > README
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ tar -cjf vagrant-libvirt-noop.tar.bz2 README
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ echo $?
0
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ cat vagrant-libvirt.spec
%global project_version 0.0.24

Name:       vagrant-libvirt
Version:    0.0.24
Release:    noop
Summary:    A fake vagrant-libvirt RPM
License:    AGPLv3+
Source0:    vagrant-libvirt-noop.tar.bz2
BuildArch:  noarch

Requires:   vagrant >= 1.6.5

%description
A fake vagrant-libvirt RPM

%prep
%setup -c -q -T -D -a 0

%build

%install

%files

%changelog

Okay great! Now to build the RPM…

Step 4: The empty RPM

james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ mkdir SOURCES
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ mv vagrant-libvirt-noop.tar.bz2 SOURCES/
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)/" -bs vagrant-libvirt.spec
Wrote: /tmp/rpmbuild/SRPMS/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.src.rpm
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)/" -bb vagrant-libvirt.spec
Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.dUivHv
+ umask 022
+ cd /tmp/rpmbuild//BUILD
+ cd /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ /usr/bin/mkdir -p vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24
+ cd vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24
+ /usr/bin/bzip2 -dc /tmp/rpmbuild/SOURCES/vagrant-libvirt-noop.tar.bz2
+ /usr/bin/tar -xf -
+ STATUS=0
+ '[' 0 -ne 0 ']'
+ /usr/bin/chmod -Rf a+rX,u+w,g-w,o-w .
+ exit 0
Executing(%build): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.kLSHn2
+ umask 022
+ cd /tmp/rpmbuild//BUILD
+ cd vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24
+ exit 0
Executing(%install): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.xTiM4y
+ umask 022
+ cd /tmp/rpmbuild//BUILD
+ '[' /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64 '!=' / ']'
+ rm -rf /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64
++ dirname /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64
+ mkdir -p /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT
+ mkdir /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64
+ cd vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24
+ /usr/lib/rpm/find-debuginfo.sh --strict-build-id -m --run-dwz --dwz-low-mem-die-limit 10000000 --dwz-max-die-limit 110000000 /tmp/rpmbuild//BUILD/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24
/usr/lib/rpm/sepdebugcrcfix: Updated 0 CRC32s, 0 CRC32s did match.
+ /usr/lib/rpm/check-rpaths /usr/lib/rpm/check-buildroot
+ /usr/lib/rpm/brp-compress
+ /usr/lib/rpm/brp-strip-static-archive /usr/bin/strip
+ /usr/lib/rpm/brp-python-bytecompile /usr/bin/python 1
+ /usr/lib/rpm/brp-python-hardlink
+ /usr/lib/rpm/redhat/brp-java-repack-jars
Processing files: vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.noarch
Checking for unpackaged file(s): /usr/lib/rpm/check-files /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64
Wrote: /tmp/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.noarch.rpm
Executing(%clean): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.0lR0a6
+ umask 022
+ cd /tmp/rpmbuild//BUILD
+ cd vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24
+ /usr/bin/rm -rf /tmp/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64
+ exit 0
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$

This worked too! It has some interesting output though…

james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ rpm -qlp RPMS/noarch/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.noarch.rpm
(contains no files)
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ ls -lAh RPMS/noarch/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.noarch.rpm
-rw-rw-r--. 1 james 5.5K Aug 11 11:53 RPMS/noarch/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.noarch.rpm
james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$

As you can see this has created an empty RPM, but which is about 5k in size. While this worked, builds submitted in COPR don’t generate any output. I suppose this is a bug in COPR, but in the meantime, I still wanted something working. I added some nonsense to the spec file to continue.

Step 5: The final product

james@computer:/tmp/rpmbuild$ cat vagrant-libvirt.spec 
%global project_version 0.0.24

Name:       vagrant-libvirt
Version:    0.0.24
Release:    noop
Summary:    A fake vagrant-libvirt RPM
License:    AGPLv3+
Source0:    vagrant-libvirt-noop.tar.bz2
BuildArch:  noarch

Requires:   vagrant >= 1.6.5

%description
A fake vagrant-libvirt RPM

%prep
%setup -c -q -T -D -a 0

%build

%install
rm -rf %{buildroot}
# _datadir is typically /usr/share/
install -d -m 0755 %{buildroot}/%{_datadir}/vagrant-libvirt/
echo "This is a phony vagrant-libvirt package." > %{buildroot}/%{_datadir}/vagrant-libvirt/README

%files
%{_datadir}/vagrant-libvirt/README

%changelog

After running the usual build commands, and sticking an SRPM up in COPR, this builds and installs as expected! Phew! There might a manual way to do this with cpio, but I wanted to use the official tools, and avoid hacking the spec.

Perhaps there is a simpler way to workaround all of this, but until I find it, I hope you’ve enjoyed my story,

Happy Hacking!

James

UPDATE: Reader Jan pointed out, that you could use fpm to accomplish the same thing with a one-liner. The modified one-liner is:

fpm -s empty -t rpm -d 'vagrant >= 1.6.5' -n vagrant-libvirt -v 0.0.24 --iteration noop

This is a much shorter and more elegant solution, with the one exception that fpm doesn’t currently produce SRPMS, which are needed so that a trusted build service like COPR distributes them to the users.

Here’s the full output and comparison and anyways:

james@computer:/tmp/ftest$ fpm -s empty -t rpm -d 'vagrant >= 1.6.5' -n vagrant-libvirt -v 0.0.24 --iteration noop
no value for epoch is set, defaulting to nil {:level=>:warn}
no value for epoch is set, defaulting to nil {:level=>:warn}
Created package {:path=>"vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64.rpm"}
james@computer:/tmp/ftest$ sha1sum vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64.rpm 61b1c200d2efa87d790a2243ccbc4c4ebb7ef64d  vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.x86_64.rpm
james@computer:/tmp/ftest$ sha1sum ~/code/oh-my-vagrant/extras/.rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.noarch.rpm 
5f2abb15264de6c1c7f09039945cd7bbd3a96404  /home/james/code/oh-my-vagrant/extras/.rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/vagrant-libvirt-0.0.24-noop.noarch.rpm

While the two sha1sums aren’t identical (probably due to timestamps or some other variant) the two RPM’s should be functionally identical.

Git archive with submodules and tar magic

Git submodules are actually a very beautiful thing. You might prefer the word powerful or elegant, but that’s not the point. The downside is that they are sometimes misused, so as always, use with care. I’ve used them in projects like puppet-gluster, oh-my-vagrant, and others. If you’re not familiar with them, do a bit of reading and come back later, I’ll wait.

I recently did some work packaging Oh-My-Vagrant as RPM’s. My primary goal was to make sure the entire process was automatic, as I have no patience for manually building RPM’s. Any good packager knows that the pre-requisite for building a SRPM is a source tarball, and I wanted to build those automatically too.

Simply running a tar -cf on my source directory wouldn’t work, because I only want to include files that are stored in git. Thankfully, git comes with a tool called git archive, which does exactly that! No scary tar commands required:

Nobody likes tar

Here’s how you might run it:

$ git archive --prefix=some-project/ -o output.tar.bz2 HEAD

Let’s decompose:

The --prefix argument prepends a string prefix onto every file in the archive. Therefore, if you’d like the root directory to be named some-project, then you prepend that string with a trailing slash, and you’ll have everything nested inside a directory!

The -o flag predictably picks the output file and format. Using .tar.bz2 is quite common.

Lastly, the HEAD portion at the end specifies which git tree to pull the files from. I usually specify a git tag here, but you can specify a commit id if you prefer.

Obligatory, "make this article more interesting" meme image.

Obligatory, “make this article more interesting” meme image.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately, when I open my newly created archive, it is notably missing my git submodules! It would probably make sense for there to be an upstream option so that a --recursive flag would do this magic for you, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist yet.

There are a few scripts floating around that can do this, but I wanted something small, and without any real dependencies, that I can embed in my project Makefile, so that it’s all self-contained.

Here’s what that looks like:

sometarget:
    @echo Running git archive...
    # use HEAD if tag doesn't exist yet, so that development is easier...
    git archive --prefix=oh-my-vagrant-$(VERSION)/ -o $(SOURCE) $(VERSION) 2> /dev/null || (echo 'Warning: $(VERSION) does not exist.' && git archive --prefix=oh-my-vagrant-$(VERSION)/ -o $(SOURCE) HEAD)
    # TODO: if git archive had a --submodules flag this would easier!
    @echo Running git archive submodules...
    # i thought i would need --ignore-zeros, but it doesn't seem necessary!
    p=`pwd` && (echo .; git submodule foreach) | while read entering path; do \
        temp="$${path%\'}"; \
        temp="$${temp#\'}"; \
        path=$$temp; \
        [ "$$path" = "" ] && continue; \
        (cd $$path && git archive --prefix=oh-my-vagrant-$(VERSION)/$$path/ HEAD > $$p/rpmbuild/tmp.tar && tar --concatenate --file=$$p/$(SOURCE) $$p/rpmbuild/tmp.tar && rm $$p/rpmbuild/tmp.tar); \
    done

This is a bit tricky to read, so I’ll try to break it down. Remember, double dollar signs are used in Make syntax for embedded bash code since a single dollar sign is a special Make identifier. The $(VERSION) variable corresponds to the version of the project I’m building, which matches a git tag that I’ve previously created. $(SOURCE) corresponds to an output file name, ending in the .tar.bz2 suffix.

    p=`pwd` && (echo .; git submodule foreach) | while read entering path; do \

In this first line, we store the current working directory for use later, and then loop through the output of the git submodule foreach command. That output normally looks something like this:

james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ git submodule foreach 
Entering 'vagrant/gems/xdg'
Entering 'vagrant/kubernetes/templates/default'
Entering 'vagrant/p4h'
Entering 'vagrant/puppet/modules/module-data'
Entering 'vagrant/puppet/modules/puppet'
Entering 'vagrant/puppet/modules/stdlib'
Entering 'vagrant/puppet/modules/yum'

As you can see, this shows that the above read command, eats up the Entering string, and pulls the quoted path into the second path variable. The next part of the code:

        temp="$${path%\'}"; \
        temp="$${temp#\'}"; \
        path=$$temp; \
        [ "$$path" = "" ] && continue; \

uses bash idioms to remove the two single quotes that wrap our string, and then skip over any empty versions of the path variable in our loop. Lastly, for each submodule found, we first switch into that directory:

        (cd $$path &&

Run a normal git archive command and create a plain uncompressed tar archive in a temporary directory:

git archive --prefix=oh-my-vagrant-$(VERSION)/$$path/ HEAD > $$p/rpmbuild/tmp.tar &&

Then use the magic of tar to overlay this new tar file, on top of the source file that we’re now building up with each iteration of this loop, and then remove the temporary file.

tar --concatenate --file=$$p/$(SOURCE) $$p/rpmbuild/tmp.tar && rm $$p/rpmbuild/tmp.tar); \

Finally, we end the loop:

    done

Boom, magic! Short, concise, and without any dependencies but bash and git.

Nobody should have to figure that out by themselves, and I wish it was built in to git, but until then, here’s how it’s done! Many thanks to #git on IRC for pointing me in the right direction.

This is the commit where I landed this patch for oh-my-vagrant, if you’re curious to see this in the wild. Now that this is done, I can definitely say that it was worth the time:

Is it worth the time? In this case, it was.

With this feature merged, along with my automatic COPR builds, a simple ‘make rpm‘, causes all of this automation to happen, and delivers a fresh build from git in a few minutes.

I hope you enjoyed this technique, and I hope you have some coding skills to get this feature upstream in git.

Happy Hacking,

James

Oh-My-Vagrant “Mainstream” mode and COPR RPM’s

Making Oh-My-Vagrant (OMV) more developer accessible and easy to install (from a distribution package like RPM) has always been a goal, but was previously never a priority. This is all sorted out now. In this article, I’ll explain how “mainstream” mode works, and how the RPM work was done. (I promise this will be somewhat interesting!)

Prerequisites:

If you haven’t read any of the previous articles about Oh-My-Vagrant, I’d recommend you start there. Many of the articles include screencasts, and combined with the examples/ folder, this is probably the best way to learn OMV, because the documentation could use some love.

Installation:

OMV is now easily installable on Fedora 22 via COPR. It probably works on other distros and versions, but I haven’t tested all of those combinations. This is a colossal improvement from when I first posted about this publicly in 2013. There is still one annoying bug that I occasionally hit. Let me know if you can reproduce.

Install from COPR:

james@computer:~$ sudo dnf copr enable purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant

You are about to enable a Copr repository. Please note that this
repository is not part of the main Fedora distribution, and quality
may vary.

The Fedora Project does not exercise any power over the contents of
this repository beyond the rules outlined in the Copr FAQ at
, and
packages are not held to any quality or security level.

Please do not file bug reports about these packages in Fedora
Bugzilla. In case of problems, contact the owner of this repository.

Do you want to continue? [y/N]: y
Repository successfully enabled.
james@computer:~$ sudo dnf install oh-my-vagrant
Last metadata expiration check performed 0:05:08 ago on Tue Jul  7 22:58:45 2015.
Dependencies resolved.
================================================================================
 Package           Arch     Version            Repository                  Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 oh-my-vagrant     noarch   0.0.7-1            purpleidea-oh-my-vagrant   270 k
 vagrant           noarch   1.7.2-7.fc22       updates                    428 k
 vagrant-libvirt   noarch   0.0.26-2.fc22      fedora                      57 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install  3 Packages

Total download size: 755 k
Installed size: 2.5 M
Is this ok [y/N]: n
Operation aborted.
james@computer:~$ sudo dnf install -y oh-my-vagrant
Last metadata expiration check performed 0:05:19 ago on Tue Jul  7 22:58:45 2015.
Dependencies resolved.
================================================================================
 Package           Arch     Version            Repository                  Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 oh-my-vagrant     noarch   0.0.7-1            purpleidea-oh-my-vagrant   270 k
 vagrant           noarch   1.7.2-7.fc22       updates                    428 k
 vagrant-libvirt   noarch   0.0.26-2.fc22      fedora                      57 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install  3 Packages

Total download size: 755 k
Installed size: 2.5 M
Downloading Packages:
(1/3): vagrant-1.7.2-7.fc22.noarch.rpm          626 kB/s | 428 kB     00:00    
(2/3): vagrant-libvirt-0.0.26-2.fc22.noarch.rpm  70 kB/s |  57 kB     00:00    
(3/3): oh-my-vagrant-0.0.7-1.noarch.rpm         243 kB/s | 270 kB     00:01    
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                                           246 kB/s | 755 kB     00:03     
Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded.
Running transaction
  Installing  : vagrant-1.7.2-7.fc22.noarch                                 1/3 
  Installing  : vagrant-libvirt-0.0.26-2.fc22.noarch                        2/3 
  Installing  : oh-my-vagrant-0.0.7-1.noarch                                3/3 
  Verifying   : oh-my-vagrant-0.0.7-1.noarch                                1/3 
  Verifying   : vagrant-libvirt-0.0.26-2.fc22.noarch                        2/3 
  Verifying   : vagrant-1.7.2-7.fc22.noarch                                 3/3 

Installed:
  oh-my-vagrant.noarch 0.0.7-1                vagrant.noarch 1.7.2-7.fc22       
  vagrant-libvirt.noarch 0.0.26-2.fc22       

Complete!
james@computer:~$

If you’d like to avoid typing passwords over and over again when using vagrant, you can add yourself into the vagrant group. 99% of people do this. The downside is that it could allow your user account to get root privileges. Since most developers have a single user environment, it’s not a big issue. This is necessary because vagrant uses the qemu:///system connection instead of qemu:///session. If you can help fix this, please hack on it.

james@computer:~$ groups
james wheel docker
james@computer:~$ sudo usermod -aG vagrant james
# you'll need to logout/login for this change to take effect...

Lastly, there is a user session plugin addition that is required. Installation is automatic the first time you create a new OMV project. Let’s do that and see how it works!

james@computer:~$ mkdir /tmp/omvtest
james@computer:~$ cd !$
cd /tmp/omvtest
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest$ which omv
/usr/bin/omv
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest$ omv init
Oh-My-Vagrant needs to install a modified vagrant-hostmanager plugin.
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Cloning into 'vagrant-hostmanager'...
remote: Counting objects: 801, done.
remote: Total 801 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 801
Receiving objects: 100% (801/801), 132.22 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (467/467), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Branch feat/oh-my-vagrant set up to track remote branch feat/oh-my-vagrant from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'feat/oh-my-vagrant'
sending incremental file list
./
vagrant-hostmanager.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/
vagrant-hostmanager/action.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/command.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/config.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/errors.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/plugin.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/provisioner.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/util.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/version.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/action/
vagrant-hostmanager/action/update_all.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/action/update_guest.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/action/update_host.rb
vagrant-hostmanager/hosts_file/
vagrant-hostmanager/hosts_file/updater.rb

sent 20,560 bytes  received 286 bytes  41,692.00 bytes/sec
total size is 19,533  speedup is 0.94
Patched successfully!
Current machine states:

omv1                      not created (libvirt)

The Libvirt domain is not created. Run `vagrant up` to create it.
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest$ ls
ansible/  docker/  kubernetes/  omv.yaml  puppet/  shell/
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest$

You can see that the plugin installation worked perfectly, and that OMV created a few files and folders.

More usage:

You can hide that generated mess in a subfolder if you prefer:

james@computer:/tmp/omvtest$ mkdir /tmp/omvtest2
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest$ cd !$
cd /tmp/omvtest2
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$ omv init mess
Current machine states:

omv1                      not created (libvirt)

The Libvirt domain is not created. Run `vagrant up` to create it.
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$ ls
mess/  omv.yaml@
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$ ls -lAh
total 0
drwxrwxr-x. 7 james 160 Jul  7 23:26 mess/
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 james  13 Jul  7 23:26 omv.yaml -> mess/omv.yaml
drwxrwxr-x. 3 james  60 Jul  7 23:26 .vagrant/
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$ tree
.
├── mess
│   ├── ansible
│   │   └── modules
│   ├── docker
│   ├── kubernetes
│   │   ├── applications
│   │   └── templates
│   ├── omv.yaml
│   ├── puppet
│   │   └── modules
│   └── shell
└── omv.yaml -> mess/omv.yaml

10 directories, 2 files
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$

As you can see all the mess is wrapped up in a single folder. This could even be named .omv if you prefer, and should all be committed inside of your project. Now that we’re installed, let’s get hacking!

Mainstream mode:

Mainstream mode further hides the ruby/Vagrantfile aspect of a Vagrant project and extends OMV so that you can define your entire project via the omv.yaml file, without the rest of the OMV project cluttering up your development tree. This makes it possible to have your project use OMV by only committing that one yaml file into the project repo.

The main difference is that you now control everything with the new omv command line tool. It’s essentially a smart wrapper around the vagrant command, so any command you used to use vagrant for, you can now substitute in omv. It also saves typing four extra characters!

As it turns out (and by no accident) the omv tool works exactly like the vagrant tool. For example:

james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$ omv status
Current machine states:

omv1                      not created (libvirt)

The Libvirt domain is not created. Run `vagrant up` to create it.
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$ omv up
Bringing machine 'omv1' up with 'libvirt' provider...
==> omv1: Box 'centos-7.1' could not be found. Attempting to find and install...
    omv1: Box Provider: libvirt
    omv1: Box Version: >= 0
==> omv1: Adding box 'centos-7.1' (v0) for provider: libvirt
    omv1: Downloading: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/purpleidea/vagrant/centos-7.1/centos-7.1.box
[snip]
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$ omv destroy
Unlocking shell provisioning for: omv1...
==> omv1: Domain is not created. Please run `vagrant up` first.
james@computer:/tmp/omvtest2$

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL…

The existing tools you know and love, like vlog, vsftp, vscreen, vcssh, vfwd, vansible, have all been modified to work with OMV mainstream mode as well. The same goes for common aliases such as vs, vp, vup, vdestroy, vrsync, and the useful (but occasionally dangerous) vrm-rf. Have a look at the above links on my blog and the source to see what these do. If it’s not clear enough, let me know!

All of these are now packaged up in the oh-my-vagrant COPR and are installed automatically into /etc/profile.d/oh-my-vagrant.sh for your convenience. Since they’re part of the OMV project, you’ll get updates when new functions or bug fixes are made.

The plumbing:

Mainstream mode is possible because of an idea rbarlow had. He gets full credit for the idea, in particular for teaching me about VAGRANT_CWD which is what makes it all work. I rejected his 6 line prototype, but loved the idea, and since he was busy making juice, I got bored one day and hacked on a full implementation.

james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ git diff --stat 853073431d227cbb0ba56aaf4fedd721904de9a8 aa764ae79d69475b87f293c43af4f20fd7d1d000
 DOCUMENTATION.md    | 18 +++++++++++++++
 bin/omv.sh          | 50 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 vagrant/Vagrantfile | 65 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------
 3 files changed, 110 insertions(+), 23 deletions(-)
james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$

It turned out it was a little longer, but I artificially inflated this by including some quick doc patches. What does it actually do differently? It sets VAGRANT_CWD and VAGRANT_DOTFILE_PATH so that the vagrant command looks in a different directory for the Vagrantfile and .vagrant/ directories. That way, all the plumbing is hidden and part of the RPM.

Making the RPM:

The RPM’s happened because stefw made me feel bad about not having them. He was right to do so. In an case, RPM packaging still scares me. I think repetitive work scares me even more. That’s why I automate as much as I can. So after a lot of brain loss, I finally made you an RPM so that you could easily install it. Here’s how it went:

I started by adding the magic so that my Makefile could build an RPM.

This made it so I can easily run make srpm to get a new RPM or SRPM.

Then I added COPR integration, so a make copr automatically kicks off a new COPR build. This was the interesting part. You’ll need a Fedora account for this to work. Once you’re logged in, if you go to https://copr.fedoraproject.org/api you’ll be able to download a snippet to put in your ~/.config/copr file. Lastly, the work happens in copr-build.py where the python copr library does the heavy lifting.

#!/usr/bin/python

# README:
# for initial setup, browse to: https://copr.fedoraproject.org/api/
# and it will have a ~/.config/copr config that you can download.
# happy hacking!

import os
import sys
import copr

COPR = 'oh-my-vagrant'
if len(sys.argv) != 2:
    print("Usage: %s <srpm url>" % sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(1)

url = sys.argv[1]

client = copr.CoprClient.create_from_file_config(os.path.expanduser("~/.config/copr"))

result = client.create_new_build(COPR, [url])
if result.output != "ok":
    print(result.error)
    sys.exit(1)
print(result.message)

A build looks like this:

james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ git tag 0.0.8 # set a new tag
james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ make copr 
Running templater...
Running git archive...
Running git archive submodules...
Running rpmbuild -bs...
Wrote: /home/james/code/oh-my-vagrant/rpmbuild/SRPMS/oh-my-vagrant-0.0.8-1.src.rpm
Running SRPMS sha256sum...
/home/james/code/oh-my-vagrant
Running SRPMS gpg...

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "James Shubin (Third PGP key.) <james@shubin.ca>"
4096-bit RSA key, ID 24090D66, created 2012-05-09

gpg: WARNING: The GNOME keyring manager hijacked the GnuPG agent.
gpg: WARNING: GnuPG will not work properly - please configure that tool to not interfere with the GnuPG system!
Running SRPMS upload...
sending incremental file list
SHA256SUMS
SHA256SUMS.asc
oh-my-vagrant-0.0.8-1.src.rpm

sent 8,583 bytes  received 2,184 bytes  4,306.80 bytes/sec
total size is 1,456,741  speedup is 135.30
Build was added to oh-my-vagrant.
james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$

A few minutes later, the COPR build page should look like this:

a screenshot of the Oh-My-Vagrant COPR build page for people who like to look at pretty pictures instead of just terminal output

A screenshot of the Oh-My-Vagrant COPR build page for people who like to look at pretty pictures instead of just terminal output.

There was a bunch of additional fixing and polishing required to get this as seamless as possible for you. Have a look at the git commits and you’ll get an idea of all the work that was done, and you’ll probably even learn about some new, features I haven’t blogged about yet. It was exhausting!

omv-exhaustedAs a result of all this, you can download fresh builds easily. Visit the COPR page to see how things are cooking:

https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant/

I’ll try to keep this pumping out releases regularly. If I lag behind, please holler at me. In any case, please let me know if you appreciate this work. Comment, tweeter, or contact me!

Happy Hacking,

James

Kubernetes clusters with Oh-My-Vagrant

I’ve added the ability to deploy a Kubernetes cluster with Oh-My-Vagrant (omv). I’ve also built an automated developer experience so that you can test your Kubernetes powered app in minutes. If you want to redeploy a new version, or see how your app behaves during a rolling update, you can use omv to test this out in minutes! I’ve recorded a screencast (~15 min), if you’d like to see some of this in action.

Background:

Kubernetes is a container cluster manager. It groups containers into pods, and those pods get scheduled to run on a certain machine in the cluster. We’ll be talking about Docker containers in this article, although there are lots of great new technologies such as nspawn.

An advantage of using Kubernetes is that it was created by a team at Google, who has a lot of experience running containers. A lot of smart folks (including many from Red Hat) are working on this project too! It is becoming the foundation for other software such as OpenShift v3. Google has released a paper on their earlier work (Borg), which is interesting, but lacks many details, and (unsurprisingly) no source code is present.

Some big disadvantages include the requirement of a CLA to contribute to the project, and the lack of good documentation and articles about it. Kubernetes itself, can’t yet be decentralized, but this might change in the future. It’s (currently) very difficult to construct the foo.json files required to build an application.

While the project is open source (ALv2) I’ve gotten the feeling that Google has a pretty strong hold on the project and has some changes to make before the community really trusts them. This can be a learning experience for any company where proprietary software is the culture. I wish them well on their journey!

Oh-My-Vagrant integration:

To deploy a Kubernetes cluster with omv, the kubernetes variable needs to be set to something meaningful. It’s also recommended that you boot up a minimum of three machines. Here is an except from an example omv.yaml config:

---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: centos-7.1-docker
:sync: rsync
:extern:
- type: git
  system: docker
  repository: https://github.com/purpleidea/docker-simple1
  directory: docker-simple1
- type: git
  system: kubernetes
  repository: https://github.com/purpleidea/kube-simple1
  directory: kube-simple1
:puppet: false
:docker: []
:kubernetes:
  applications:
  - kube-simple1/simple1.json
:vms: []
:namespace: omv
:count: 3

In the above example, you can see that we’ve only listed one Kubernetes application, but an arbitrary number can be included. The kubernetes variable can also accept a key named master if you’d like to choose which of your vm’s should be the primary. If you don’t specify this, the first vagrant machine will be chosen.

In the list of applications, instead of only specifying the .json file, you can instead specify a dictionary of key/value pairs. The .json key (file) is required, but you can also specify additional keys, such as the boolean key roll. When true, it will cause a rolling update to occur instead of a normal” update.

If you’re interested to see what needs to be done to set up Kubernetes, the bulk of the work was done by me in 1f26, but figuring out manual steps was only possible thanks to the work of my hacker friends: scollier and eparis.

Due to the power of the omv project, when you vagrant up, the necessary docker and Kubernetes projects listed in the extern variable will be automatically cloned and pulled into your omv environment.

Screencast:

You’re probably due for a screencast (~15 min). Have a watch, and then if you need review, go back and read what I’ve written above.

https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/purpleidea/screencasts/oh-my-vagrant-kubernetes-screencast.ogv

(Thanks to the Gluster community for generously hosting this video!)

Final thoughts:

I haven’t talked about networking, or actually building applications.

Container network might be a lot easier if you use an overlay network like flannel. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet built into Oh-My-Vagrant, but is in the list of feature requests if someone shows some interest.

Building useful applications is harder. In my screencast, you’ll see where to put the code, and how to iterate on it, but not what kind of code to write, or architecturally how your multi-container applications should work. Unfortunately this is out of scope for today’s article! My goal was to make it easy for you to focus on that topic, instead of having to figure out how to build the infrastructure. Hopefully Oh-My-Vagrant helps you accomplish that!

Happy hacking,

James

 

Docker containers in Oh-My-Vagrant

The Oh-My-Vagrant (omv) project is an easy way to bootstrap a development environment. It is particularly useful for spinning up an arbitrary number of virtual machines in Vagrant without writing ruby code. For multi-machine container development, omv can be used to help this happen more naturally.

Oh-My-Vagrant can be very useful as a docker application development environment. I’ve made a quick (<9min) screencast demoing this topic. Please have a look:

https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/purpleidea/screencasts/oh-my-vagrant-docker-screencast.ogv

If you watched the screencast, you should have a good overview of what’s possible. Let’s discuss some of these features in more detail.

Pull an arbitrary list of docker images:

If you use an image that was baked with vagrant-builder, you can make sure that an arbitrary list of docker images will be pre-cached into the base image so that you don’t have to wait for the slow docker registry every time you boot up a development vm.

This is easily seen in the CentOS-7.1 image definition file seen here. Here’s an excerpt:

VERSION='centos-7.1'
POSTFIX='docker'
SIZE='40'
DOCKER='centos fedora'		# list of docker images to include

The GlusterFS community gracefully hosts a copy of this image here.

If you’d like to add images to a vm you can add a list of things to pull in the docker omv.yaml variable:

---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: centos-7.1-docker
:docker:
- ubuntu
- busybox
:count: 1
: vms: []

This key is also available in the vms array.

Automatic docker builds:

If you have a Dockerfile in a vagrant/docker/*/ folder, then it will get automatically added to the running vagrant vm, and built every time you run a vagrant up. If the machine is already running, and you’d like to rebuild it from your local working directory, you can run: vagrant rsync && vagrant provision.

Automatic docker environments:

Building and defining docker applications can be a tricky process, particularly because the techniques are still quite new to developers. With Oh-My-Vagrant, this process is simplified for container developers because you can build an enhanced omv.yaml file which defines your app for you:

---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: centos-7.0-docker
:extern:
- type: git
  system: docker
  repository: https://github.com/purpleidea/docker-simple1
  directory: simple-app1
:docker: []
:vms: []
:count: 3

By listing multiple git repos in your omv.yaml file, they will be automatically pulled down and built for you. An example of the above running would look similar to this:

$ time vup omv1
Cloning into 'simple-app1'...
remote: Counting objects: 6, done.
remote: Total 6 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 6
Unpacking objects: 100% (6/6), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

Bringing machine 'omv1' up with 'libvirt' provider...
==> omv1: Creating image (snapshot of base box volume).
==> omv1: Creating domain with the following settings...
==> omv1:  -- Name:              omv_omv1
==> omv1:  -- Domain type:       kvm
==> omv1:  -- Cpus:              1
==> omv1:  -- Memory:            512M
==> omv1:  -- Base box:          centos-7.0-docker
==> omv1:  -- Storage pool:      default
==> omv1:  -- Image:             /var/lib/libvirt/images/omv_omv1.img
==> omv1:  -- Volume Cache:      default
==> omv1:  -- Kernel:            
==> omv1:  -- Initrd:            
==> omv1:  -- Graphics Type:     vnc
==> omv1:  -- Graphics Port:     5900
==> omv1:  -- Graphics IP:       127.0.0.1
==> omv1:  -- Graphics Password: Not defined
==> omv1:  -- Video Type:        cirrus
==> omv1:  -- Video VRAM:        9216
==> omv1:  -- Command line : 
==> omv1: Starting domain.
==> omv1: Waiting for domain to get an IP address...
==> omv1: Waiting for SSH to become available...
==> omv1: Starting domain.
==> omv1: Waiting for domain to get an IP address...
==> omv1: Waiting for SSH to become available...
==> omv1: Creating shared folders metadata...
==> omv1: Setting hostname...
==> omv1: Rsyncing folder: /home/james/code/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant/ => /vagrant
==> omv1: Configuring and enabling network interfaces...
==> omv1: Running provisioner: shell...
    omv1: Running: inline script
==> omv1: Running provisioner: docker...
    omv1: Configuring Docker to autostart containers...
==> omv1: Running provisioner: docker...
    omv1: Configuring Docker to autostart containers...
==> omv1: Building Docker images...
==> omv1: -- Path: /vagrant/docker/simple-app1
==> omv1: Sending build context to Docker daemon 54.27 kB
==> omv1: Sending build context to Docker daemon 
==> omv1: Step 0 : FROM fedora
==> omv1:  ---> 834629358fe2
==> omv1: Step 1 : MAINTAINER James Shubin <james@shubin.ca>
==> omv1:  ---> Running in 2afded16eec7
==> omv1:  ---> a7baf4784f57
==> omv1: Removing intermediate container 2afded16eec7
==> omv1: Step 2 : RUN echo Hello and welcome to the Technical Blog of James > README
==> omv1:  ---> Running in 709b9dc66e9b
==> omv1:  ---> b955154474f4
==> omv1: Removing intermediate container 709b9dc66e9b
==> omv1: Step 3 : ENTRYPOINT python -m SimpleHTTPServer
==> omv1:  ---> Running in 76840da9e963
==> omv1:  ---> b333c179dd56
==> omv1: Removing intermediate container 76840da9e963
==> omv1: Step 4 : EXPOSE 8000
==> omv1:  ---> Running in ebf83f08328e
==> omv1:  ---> f13049706668
==> omv1: Removing intermediate container ebf83f08328e
==> omv1: Successfully built f13049706668

real	1m12.221s
user	0m5.923s
sys	0m0.932s

All that happened in about a minute!

Conclusion:

I hope these tools help, if you’re following my git commits, you’ll notice that there are some new features I haven’t blogged about yet. Kubernetes integration exists, so please have a look, and hopefully I’ll have some screencasts and blog posts about this shortly.

Happy hacking,

James

Sharing dev environments with Oh-My-Vagrant

With Oh-My-Vagrant (omv) you can set up a dev environment in seconds. (Read the omv introduction if you’ve never used it before!) Since everything is defined in a single omv.yaml file, it is easy to share your cluster prototype with a friend! The one missing feature was associating code with this config file. This is now possible! Let me show you how it works…

In the omv.yaml file there is an extern variable. It is a list of each external repository which you’d like to include. Each element in this list is a hash of key value pairs. Currently four are supported: type, system, repository, directory.

An example will help you visualize this:

---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: fedora-21
:extern:
- type: git
  system: ansible
  repository: https://github.com/eparis/kubernetes-ansible
  directory: kubernetes
:reallyrm: true

In this example, we list one external repository. It is of type git, it is intended for use with the ansible integration provided by omv, the repository is hosted by eparis, and we’ll store this in a local directory called kubernetes.

We currently only support git repositories, but patches for other systems are welcome. A few different “systems” are supported, including puppet, docker and kubernetes. They each integrate with omv, and, as a result can pull code and modules into the appropriate places. Any repository path that is valid is acceptable (including local file paths) and lastly, the directory you choose is entirely up to you!

The most important part that I need to mention is the reallyrm variable. If this is set to true, and you remove a git repository from the list, omv will make sure that it removes it! Since some users might not expect this behaviour, it defaults to false, and shouldn’t bite you! If you’re not comfortable with it, don’t use it! I find it incredibly helpful.

Here’s a small screencast to show you some examples of this in action:

oh-my-vagrant-extern-screencast.ogv

I hope you enjoyed this. Please share and enjoy, and I’ll be back soon to explain some more of the features! Documentation patches are appreciated!

Happy hacking,

James