Thanking Oh-My-Vagrant contributors for version 1.0.0

Posted on August 18, 2015 by purpleidea

The Oh-My-Vagrant project became public about one year ago and at the time it was more of a fancy template than a robust project, but 188 commits (and counting) later, it has gotten surprisingly useful and mature.

james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ git rev-list HEAD --count
188
james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ git log $(git log --pretty=format:%H|tail -1)
commit 4faa6c89cce01c62130ef5a6d5fa0fff833da371
Author: James Shubin <james@shubin.ca>
Date:   Thu Aug 28 01:08:03 2014 -0400

    Initial commit of vagrant-puppet-docker-template...
    
    This is an attempt to prototype a default environment for
    vagrant+puppet+docker hacking. More improvements are needed for it to be
    useful, but it's probably already useful as a reference for now.

It would be easy to take most of the credit for taking the project this far, as I’ve been responsible for about 87% of the commits, but as is common, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. It is also a bug (but hopefully just an artifact) that I’ve had such a large percentage of commits. It’s quite common for a new project to start this way, but for Free Software to succeed long-term, it’s essential that the users become the contributors. Let’s try to change that going forward.

james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ git shortlog -s | sort -rn
   165    James Shubin
     5    Vasyl Kaigorodov
     4    Randy Barlow
     2    Scott Collier
     2    Milan Zink
     2    Christoph Görn
     2    aweiteka
     1    scollier
     1    Russell Tweed
     1    ncoghlan
     1    John Browning
     1    Flavio Fernandes
     1    Carsten Clasohm
james@computer:~/code/oh-my-vagrant$ echo '165/188*100' | bc -l
87.76595744680851063800

The true story behind these 188 commits is the living history of the past year. Countless hours testing the code, using the project, suggesting features, getting hit by bugs, debugging issues, patching those bugs, and so on… If you could see an accurate graph of the number of hours put into the project, you’d see a much longer list of individuals, and I would have nowhere close to 87% of that breakdown.

Contributions are important!

Contributions are important, and patches especially help. Patches from your users are what make something a community project as opposed to two separate camps of consumers and producers. It’s about time we singled out some of those contributors!

Vasyl Kaigorodov

Vasyl is a great hacker who first fixed the broken networking in OMV. Before his work merged, it was not possible to run two different OMV environments at the same time. Now networking makes a lot more sense. Unfortunately the GitHub contributors graph doesn’t acknowledge his work because he doesn’t have a GitHub account. Shame on them!

Randy Barlow (bowlofeggs)

Randy came up with the idea for “mainstream mode“, and while his initial proof of concept didn’t quite work, the idea was good. His time budget didn’t afford the project this new feature, but he has sent in some other patches including some, tweaks used by the Pulp Vagrantfile. He’s got a patch or two pending on his TODO list which we’re looking forward to, as he finishes the work to port Pulp to OMV.

Scott Collier

Scott is a great model user. He gets very enthusiastic, he’s great at testing things out and complaining if they don’t behave as he’d like, and if you’re lucky, you can brow beat him to write a quick patch or two. He actually has three commits in the project so far, which would show up correctly above if he had set his git user variables correctly ;) Thanks for spending the time to deal with OMV when there was a lot more cruft, and fewer features. I look forward to your next patch!

Milan Zink

Milan is a ruby expert who fixed the ruby xdg bugs we had in an earlier version of the project. Because of his work new users don’t even realize that there was ever an issue!

Christoph Görn

Christoph has been an invaluable promoter and dedicated user of the project. His work pushing OMV to the limit has generated real world requirements and feature requests, which have made the project useful for real users! It’s been hard to say no when he opens an issue ticket, but I’ve been able to force him to write a patch or two as well.

Russell Tweed

Russell is a new OMV user who jumped right into the code and sent in a patch for adding an arbitrary number of disks to OMV machines. As a first time contributor, I thank him for his patch and for withstanding the number of reviews it had to go through. It’s finally merged, even though we might have let one bug (now fixed) slip in too. I particularly like his patch, because I actually wrote the initial patch to add extra disks support to vagrant-libvirt, and I’m pleased to see it get used one level up!

John Browning

John actually found an edge case in the subscription manager code and after an interesting discussion, patched the issue. More users means more edge cases will fall out! Thanks John!

Flavio Fernandes

Even though Flavio is an OSX user, we’re thankful that he wrote and tested the virtualbox patch for OMV. OMV still needs an installer for OSX + mainstream mode, but once that’s done, we know the rest will work great!

Carsten Clasohm

Carsten actually wrote a lovely patch for a subtle OMV issue that is very hard to reproduce. I was able to merge his patch on the first review, and in fact it looked nicer than how I would have written it!

Nick Coghlan

Nick is actually a python hacker, so getting a ruby contribution proved a bit tricky! Fortunately, he is also a master of words, and helped clean up the documentation a bit. We’d love to get a few more doc patches if you have the time and some love!

Aaron Weitekamp

Even though aweiteka (as we call him) has only added five lines of source (2 of which were comments), he was an early user and tester, and we thank him for his contributions! Hopefully we’ll see him in our commit logs in the future!

Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a talented artist who does great work using free tools. I asked her if she’d be kind enough to make us a logo, and I’ll hopefully be able to show it to you soon!

Everyone else

To everyone else who isn’t in the commit log yet, thank you for using and testing OMV, finding bugs, opening issues and even for your social media love in getting the word out! I hope to get a patch from you soon!

The power of the unknown user

They’re sometimes hard to measure, but a recently introduced bug was reported to me independently by two different (and previously unknown) users very soon after the bug was introduced! I’m sorry for letting the bug in, but I am glad that people picked up on it so quickly! I’d love to have your help in improving our automated test infrastructure!

The AUTHORS file

Every good project needs a “hall of fame” for its contributors. That’s why, starting today there is an AUTHORS file, and if you’re a contributor, we urge you to send a one-line patch with your name, so it can be immortalized in the project forever. We could try to generate this file with git log, but that would remove the prestige behind getting your first and second patches in. If you’re not in the AUTHORS file, and you should be, send me your patch already!

Version 1.0.0

I think it’s time. The project deserves a 1.0.0 release, and I’ve now made it so. Please share and enjoy!

I hope you enjoy this project, and I look forward to receiving your patch.

Happy Hacking!

James

PS: Thanks to Brian Bouterse for encouraging me to focus on community, and for inspiring me to write this post!

Vagrant and Oh-My-Vagrant on RHEL7

Posted on August 11, 2015 by purpleidea

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

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

Posted on July 8, 2015 by purpleidea

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 &lt;srpm url&gt;" % 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.

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!

As 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

Docker containers in Oh-My-Vagrant

Posted on April 20, 2015 by purpleidea

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

Introducing: Oh My Vagrant!

Posted on September 3, 2014 by purpleidea

If you’re a reader of my code or of this blog, it’s no secret that I hack on a lot of puppet and vagrant. Recently I’ve fooled around with a bit of docker, too. I realized that the vagrant, environments I built for puppet-gluster and puppet-ipa needed to be generalized, and they needed new features too. Therefore…

Introducing: Oh My Vagrant!

Oh My Vagrant is an attempt to provide an easy to use development environment so that you can be up and hacking quickly, and focusing on the real devops problems. The README explains my choice of project name.

Prerequisites:

I use a Fedora 20 laptop with vagrant-libvirt. Efforts are underway to create an RPM of vagrant-libvirt, but in the meantime you’ll have to read: Vagrant on Fedora with libvirt (reprise). This should work with other distributions too, but I don’t test them very often. Please step up and help test :)

The bits:

First clone the oh-my-vagrant repository and look inside:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant
cd oh-my-vagrant/vagrant/

The included Vagrantfile is the current heart of this project. You’re welcome to use it as a template and edit it directly, or you can use the facilities it provides. I’d recommend starting with the latter, which I’ll walk you through now.

Getting started:

Start by running vagrant status (vs) and taking a look at the vagrant.yaml file that appears.

james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ ls
Dockerfile  puppet/  Vagrantfile
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ vs
Current machine states:

template1                 not created (libvirt)

The Libvirt domain is not created. Run `vagrant up` to create it.
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ cat vagrant.yaml 
---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: centos-7.0
:sync: rsync
:puppet: false
:docker: false
:cachier: false
:vms: []
:namespace: template
:count: 1
:username: ''
:password: ''
:poolid: []
:repos: []
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$

Here you’ll see the list of resultant machines that vagrant thinks is defined (currently just template1), and a bunch of different settings in YAML format. The values of these settings help define the vagrant environment that you’ll be hacking in.

Changing settings:

The settings exist so that your vagrant environment is dynamic and can be changed quickly. You can change the settings by editing the vagrant.yaml file. They will be used by vagrant when it runs. You can also change them at runtime with --vagrant-foo flags. Running a vagrant status will show you how vagrant currently sees the environment. Let’s change the number of machines that are defined. Note the location of the --vagrant-count flag and how it doesn’t work when positioned incorrectly.

james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ vagrant status --vagrant-count=4
An invalid option was specified. The help for this command
is available below.

Usage: vagrant status [name]
    -h, --help                       Print this help
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ vagrant --vagrant-count=4 status
Current machine states:

template1                 not created (libvirt)
template2                 not created (libvirt)
template3                 not created (libvirt)
template4                 not created (libvirt)

This environment represents multiple VMs. The VMs are all listed
above with their current state. For more information about a specific
VM, run `vagrant status NAME`.
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ cat vagrant.yaml 
---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: centos-7.0
:sync: rsync
:puppet: false
:docker: false
:cachier: false
:vms: []
:namespace: template
:count: 4
:username: ''
:password: ''
:poolid: []
:repos: []
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$

As you can see in the above example, changing the count variable to 4, causes vagrant to see a possible four machines in the vagrant environment. You can change as many of these parameters at a time by using the --vagrant- flags, or you can edit the vagrant.yaml file. The latter is much easier and more expressive, in particular for expressing complex data types. The former is much more powerful when building one-liners, such as:

vagrant --vagrant-count=8 --vagrant-namespace=gluster up gluster{1..8}

which should bring up eight hosts in parallel, named gluster1 to gluster8.

Other VM’s:

Since one often wants to be more expressive in machine naming and heterogeneity of machine type, you can specify a list of machines to define in the vagrant.yaml file vms array. If you’d rather define these machines in the Vagrantfile itself, you can also set them up in the vms array defined there. It is empty by default, but it is easy to uncomment out one of the many examples. These will be used as the defaults if nothing else overrides the selection in the vagrant.yaml file. I’ve uncommented a few to show you this functionality:

james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ grep example[124] Vagrantfile 
    {:name => 'example1', :docker => true, :puppet => true, },    # example1
    {:name => 'example2', :docker => ['centos', 'fedora'], },    # example2
    {:name => 'example4', :image => 'centos-6', :puppet => true, },    # example4
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ rm vagrant.yaml # note that I remove the old settings
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ vs
Current machine states:

template1                 not created (libvirt)
example1                  not created (libvirt)
example2                  not created (libvirt)
example4                  not created (libvirt)

This environment represents multiple VMs. The VMs are all listed
above with their current state. For more information about a specific
VM, run `vagrant status NAME`.
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ cat vagrant.yaml 
---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: centos-7.0
:sync: rsync
:puppet: false
:docker: false
:cachier: false
:vms:
- :name: example1
  :docker: true
  :puppet: true
- :name: example2
  :docker:
  - centos
  - fedora
- :name: example4
  :image: centos-6
  :puppet: true
:namespace: template
:count: 1
:username: ''
:password: ''
:poolid: []
:repos: []
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ vim vagrant.yaml # edit vagrant.yaml file...
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ cat vagrant.yaml 
---
:domain: example.com
:network: 192.168.123.0/24
:image: centos-7.0
:sync: rsync
:puppet: false
:docker: false
:cachier: false
:vms:
- :name: example1
  :docker: true
  :puppet: true
- :name: example4
  :image: centos-7.0
  :puppet: true
:namespace: template
:count: 1
:username: ''
:password: ''
:poolid: []
:repos: []
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$ vs
Current machine states:

template1                 not created (libvirt)
example1                  not created (libvirt)
example4                  not created (libvirt)

This environment represents multiple VMs. The VMs are all listed
above with their current state. For more information about a specific
VM, run `vagrant status NAME`.
james@computer:/oh-my-vagrant/vagrant$

The above output might seem a little long, but if you try these steps out in your terminal, you should get a hang of it fairly quickly. If you poke around in the Vagrantfile, you should see the format of the vms array. Each element in the array should be a dictionary, where the keys correspond to the flags you wish to set. Look at the examples if you need help with the formatting.

Other settings:

As you saw, other settings are available. There are a few notable ones that are worth mentioning. This will also help explain some of the other features that this Vagrantfile provides.

domain: This sets the domain part of each vm’s FQDN. The default is example.com, which should work for most environments, but you’re welcome to change this as you see fit.
network: This sets the network that is used for the vm’s. You should pick a network/cidr that doesn’t conflict with any other networks on your machine. This is particularly useful when you have multiple vagrant environments hosted off of the same laptop.
image: This is the default base image to use for each machine. It can be overridden per-machine in the vm’s list of dictionaries.
sync: This is the sync type used for vagrant. rsync is the default and works in all environments. If you’d prefer to fight with the nfs mounts, or try out 9p, both those options are available too.
puppet: This option enables or disables integration with puppet. It is possible to override this per machine. This functionality will be expanded in a future version of Oh My Vagrant.
docker: This option enables and lists the docker images to set up per vm. It is possible to override this per machine. This functionality will be expanded in a future version of Oh My Vagrant.
namespace: This sets the namespace that your Vagrantfile operates in. This value is used as a prefix for the numbered vm’s, as the libvirt network name, and as the primary puppet module to execute.

Vagrant on Fedora with libvirt (reprise)

Posted on May 13, 2014 by purpleidea

Vagrant has become the de facto tool for devops. Faster iterations, clean environments, and less overhead. This isn’t an article about why you should use Vagrant. This is an article about how to get up and running with Vagrant on Fedora with libvirt easily!

Background:

This article is an update of my original Vagrant on Fedora with libvirt article. There is still lots of good information in that article, but this one should be easier to follow and uses updated versions of Vagrant and vagrant-libvirt.

Why vagrant-libvirt?

Vagrant ships by default with support for virtualbox. This makes sense as a default since it is available on Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux. Real hackers use GNU/Linux, and in my opinion the best tool for GNU/Linux is vagrant-libvirt. Proprietary, closed source platforms aren’t hackable and therefore aren’t cool!

Another advantage to using the vagrant-libvirt plugin is that it plays nicely with the existing ecosystem of libvirt tools. You can use virsh, virt-manager, and guestfish alongside Vagrant, and if your development work needs to go into production, you can be confident in knowing that it was already tested on the same awesome KVM virtualization platform that your servers run.

Prerequisites:

Let’s get going. What do you need?

A Fedora 20 machine

I recommend hardware that supports VT extensions. Most does these days. This should also work with other GNU/Linux distro’s, but I haven’t tested them.

Installation:

I’m going to go through this in a logical hacking order. This means you could group all the yum install commands into a single execution at the beginning, but you would learn much less by doing so.

First install some of your favourite hacking dependencies. I did this on a minimal, headless F20 installation. You might want to add some of these too:

# yum install -y wget tree vim screen mtr nmap telnet tar git

Update the system to make sure it’s fresh:

# yum update -y

Update: I’m actually now using vagrant 1.6.5, and you should try that instead. It should work for you too. Modify the below to match the newer version.

Download Vagrant version 1.5.4. No, don’t use the latest version, it probably won’t work! Vagrant has new releases practically as often as there are sunsets, and they typically cause lots of breakages.

$ wget https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_1.5.4_x86_64.rpm

and install it:

# yum install -y vagrant_1.5.4_x86_64.rpm

RVM installation:

In order to get vagrant-libvirt working, you’ll need some ruby dependencies. It turns out that RVM seems to be the best way to get exactly what you need. Use the sketchy RVM installer:

# \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

If you don’t know why that’s sketchy, then you probably shouldn’t be hacking! I did that as root, but it probably works when you run it as a normal user. At this point rvm should be installed. The last important thing you’ll need to do is to add yourself to the rvm group. This is only needed if you installed rvm as root:

# usermod -aG rvm <username>

You’ll probably need to logout and log back in for this to take effect. Run:

$ groups

to make sure you can see rvm in the list. If you ran rvm as root, you’ll want to source the rvm.sh file:

$ source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh

or simply use a new terminal. If you ran it as a normal user, I think RVM adds something to your ~/.bashrc. You might want to reload it:

$ source ~/.bashrc

At this point RVM should be working. Let’s see which ruby’s it can install:

$ rvm list known

Ruby version ruby-2.0.0-p353 seems closest to what is available on my Fedora 20 machine, so I’ll use that:

$ rvm install ruby-2.0.0-p353

If the exact patch number isn’t available, choose what’s closest. Installing ruby requires a bunch of dependencies. The rvm install command will ask yum for a bunch of dependencies, but if you’d rather install them yourself, you can run:

# yum install -y patch libyaml-devel libffi-devel glibc-headers autoconf gcc-c++ glibc-devel patch readline-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel bzip2 automake libtool bison

GEM installation:

Now we need the GEM dependencies for the vagrant-libvirt plugin. These GEM’s happen to have their own build dependencies, but thankfully I’ve already figured those out for you:

# yum install -y libvirt-devel libxslt-devel libxml2-devel

Update: Typically we used to now have to install the nokogiri dependencies. With newer versions of vagrant-libvirt, this is no longer necessarily required. Consider skipping this step, and trying to install the vagrant-libvirt plugin without specifying a version. If it doesn’t work, try vagrant-libvirt version 0.0.20, if that doesn’t work, install nokogiri. Feel free to post your updated experiences in the comments!

Now, install the nokogiri gem that vagrant-libvirt needs:

$ gem install nokogiri -v '1.5.11'

and finally we can install the actual vagrant-libvirt plugin:

$ vagrant plugin install --plugin-version 0.0.16 vagrant-libvirt

You don’t have to specify the –plugin-version 0.0.16 part, but doing so will make sure that you get a version that I have tested to be compatible with Vagrant 1.5.4 should a newer vagrant-libvirt release not be compatible with the Vagrant version you’re using. If you’re feeling brave, please test newer versions, report bugs, and write patches!

Making Vagrant more useful:

Vagrant should basically work at this point, but it’s missing some awesome. I’m proud to say that I wrote this awesome. I recommend my bash function and alias additions. If you’d like to include them, you can run:

$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/purpleidea/8071962/raw/ee27c56e66aafdcb9fd9760f123e7eda51a6a51e/.bashrc_vagrant.sh
$ echo '. ~/.bashrc_vagrant.sh' >> ~/.bashrc
$ . ~/.bashrc    # reload

to pull in my most used Vagrant aliases and functions. I’ve written about them before. If you’re interested, please read:

KVM/QEMU installation:

As I mentioned earlier, I’m assuming you have a minimal Fedora 20 installation, so you might not have all the libvirt pieces installed! Here’s how to install any potentially missing pieces:

# yum install -y libvirt{,-daemon-kvm}

This should pull in a whole bunch of dependencies too. You will need to start and (optionally) enable the libvirtd service:

# systemctl start libvirtd.service
# systemctl enable libvirtd.service

You’ll notice that I’m using the systemd commands instead of the deprecated service command. My biggest (only?) gripe with systemd is that the command line tools aren’t as friendly as they could be! The systemctl equivalent requires more typing, and make it harder to start or stop the same service in quick succession, because it buries the action in the middle of the command instead of leaving it at the end!

The libvirtd service should finally be running. On my machine, it comes with a default network which got in the way of my vagrant-libvirt networking. If you want to get rid of it, you can run:

# virsh net-destroy default
# virsh net-undefine default

and it shouldn’t bother you anymore. One last hiccup. If it’s your first time installing KVM, you might run into bz#950436. To workaround this issue, I had to run:

# rmmod kvm_intel
# rmmod kvm
# modprobe kvm
# modprobe kvm_intel

Without this “module re-loading” you might see this error:

Call to virDomainCreateWithFlags failed: internal error: Process exited while reading console log output: char device redirected to /dev/pts/2 (label charserial0)
Could not access KVM kernel module: Permission denied
failed to initialize KVM: Permission denied

Additional installations:

To make your machine somewhat more palatable, you might want to consider installing bash-completion:

# yum install -y bash-completion

You’ll also probably want to add the PolicyKit (polkit) .pkla file that I recommend in my earlier article. Typically that means adding something like:

[Allow james libvirt management permissions]
Identity=unix-user:james
Action=org.libvirt.unix.manage
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes

as root to somewhere like:

/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/vagrant.pkla

Your machine should now be setup perfectly! The last thing you’ll need to do is to make sure that you get a Vagrantfile that does things properly! Here are some recommendations.

Shared folders:

Shared folders are a mechanism that Vagrant uses to pass data into (and sometimes out of) the virtual machines that it is managing. Typically you can use NFS, rsync, and some provider specific folder sharing like 9p. Using rsync is the simplest to set up, and works exceptionally well. Make sure you include the following line in your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.synced_folder './', '/vagrant', type: 'rsync'

If you want to see an example of this in action, you can have a look at my puppet-gluster Vagrantfile. If you are using the puppet apply provisioner, you will have to set it to use rsync as well:

puppet.synced_folder_type = 'rsync'

KVM performance:

Due to a regression in vagrant-libvirt, the default driver used for virtual machines is qemu. If you want to use the accelerated KVM domain type, you’ll have to set it:

libvirt.driver = 'kvm'

This typically gives me a 5x performance increase over plain qemu. This fix is available in the latest vagrant-libvirt version. The default has been set to KVM in the latest git master.

Dear internets!

I think this was fairly straightforward. You could probably even put all of these commands in a shell script and just run it to get it all going. What we really need is proper RPM packaging. If you can help out, that would be excellent!

If we had a version of vagrant-libvirt alongside a matching Vagrant version in Fedora, then developers and hackers could target that, and we could easily exchange dev environments, hackers could distribute product demos as full vagrant-libvirt clusters, and I could stop having to write these types of articles ;)

I hope this was helpful to you. Please let me know in the comments.

Happy hacking,

James

Screencasts of Puppet-Gluster + Vagrant

Posted on January 27, 2014 by purpleidea

I decided to record some screencasts to show how easy it is to deploy GlusterFS using Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant. You can follow along even if you don’t know anything about Puppet or Vagrant. The hardest part of this process was producing the actual videos!

If recommend first reading my earlier articles if you’re planning on following along:

Without any further delay, here are the screencasts:

Part 1: Intro, and provisioning of the Puppet server.

Part 2: Initial building of the Gluster hosts.

Part 3: Finishing the Gluster builds.

Part 4: GlusterFS client mounting and tests.

Part 5: Mixed bag of code, infrastructure tours, examples and other details.

I hope you enjoyed these videos. Thank you to the Gluster.org community for hosting them. If you liked these videos, please consider sponsoring some of my work, or making a donation!

As a side note, the only screencast tool that worked was gtk-recordmydesktop, however it deleted my second recording (which had to be re-recorded) and the audio stopped working one minute into my third recording (which had to then be separately recorded, and mixed in). Amazingly, pitivi was the only tool which worked to properly mix them together!

Happy Hacking,

James

PS: Please note, you may not sell, edit, redistribute, perform, or host these videos elsewhere without my permission. I especially don’t want to see them on youtube until Google let’s me unlink my youtube account! If you do want my permission to use these videos for something, contact me, and we can work something out. I’ll surely allow it if it’s not for something evil. If you’d rather have an interactive, live demo, let me know!

Building base images for Vagrant with a Makefile

Posted on January 20, 2014 by purpleidea

I needed a base image “box” for my Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant work. It would have been great if good boxes already existed, and even better if it were easy to build my own. As it turns out, I wasn’t able to satisfy either of these conditions, so I’ve had to build one myself! I’ve published all of my code, so that you can use these techniques and tools too!

Status quo:

Having an NIH problem is bad for your vision, and it’s best to benefit from existing tools before creating your own. I first tried using vagrant-cachier, and then veewee, and packer. Vagrant-cachier is a great tool, but it turned out not being very useful because there weren’t any base images available for download that met my needs. Veewee and packer can build those images, but they both failed in doing so for different reasons. Hopefully this situation will improve in the future.

Writing a script:

I started by hacking together a short shell script of commands for building base images. There wasn’t much programming involved as the process was fairly linear, but it was useful to figure out what needed getting done.

I decided to use the excellent virt-builder command to put together the base image. This is exactly what it’s good at doing! To install it on Fedora 20, you can run:

$ sudo yum install libguestfs-tools

It wasn’t available in Fedora 19, but after a lot of pain, I managed to build (mostly correct?) packages. I have posted them online if you are brave (or crazy?) enough to want them.

Using the right tool:

After building a few images, I realized that a shell script was the wrong tool, and that it was time for an upgrade. What was the right tool? GNU Make! After working on this for more hours than I’m ready to admit, I present to you, a lovingly crafted virtual machine base image (“box”) builder:

Makefile

The Makefile itself is quite compact. It uses a few shell scripts to do some of the customization, and builds a clean image in about ten minutes. To use it, just run make.

Customization:

At the moment, it builds x86_64, CentOS 6.5+ machines for vagrant-libvirt, but you can edit the Makefile to build a custom image of your choosing. I’ve gone out of my way to add an $(OUTPUT) variable to the Makefile so that your generated files get saved in /tmp/ or somewhere outside of your source tree.

Download the image:

If you’d like to download the image that I generated, it is being generously hosted by the Gluster community here. If you’re using the Vagrantfile from my Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant setup, then you don’t have to download it manually, this will happen automatically.

Open issues:

The biggest issue with the images is that SELinux gets disabled! You might be okay with this, but it’s actually quite unfortunate. It is disabled to avoid the SELinux relabelling that happens on first boot, as this overhead defeats the usefulness of a fast vagrant deployment. If you know of a way to fix this problem, please let me know!

Example output:

If you’d like to see this in action, but don’t want to run it yourself, here’s an example run:

$ date && time make && date
Mon Jan 20 10:57:35 EST 2014
Running templater...
Running virt-builder...
[   1.0] Downloading: http://libguestfs.org/download/builder/centos-6.xz
[   4.0] Planning how to build this image
[   4.0] Uncompressing
[  19.0] Resizing (using virt-resize) to expand the disk to 40.0G
[ 173.0] Opening the new disk
[ 181.0] Setting a random seed
[ 181.0] Setting root password
[ 181.0] Installing packages: screen vim-enhanced git wget file man tree nmap tcpdump htop lsof telnet mlocate bind-utils koan iftop yum-utils nc rsync nfs-utils sudo openssh-server openssh-clients
[ 212.0] Uploading: files/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm to /root/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
[ 212.0] Uploading: files/puppetlabs-release-el-6.noarch.rpm to /root/puppetlabs-release-el-6.noarch.rpm
[ 212.0] Uploading: files/selinux to /etc/selinux/config
[ 212.0] Deleting: /.autorelabel
[ 212.0] Running: yum install -y /root/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm && rm -f /root/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
[ 214.0] Running: yum install -y bash-completion moreutils
[ 235.0] Running: yum install -y /root/puppetlabs-release-el-6.noarch.rpm && rm -f /root/puppetlabs-release-el-6.noarch.rpm
[ 239.0] Running: yum install -y puppet
[ 254.0] Running: yum update -y
[ 375.0] Running: files/user.sh
[ 376.0] Running: files/ssh.sh
[ 376.0] Running: files/network.sh
[ 376.0] Running: files/cleanup.sh
[ 377.0] Finishing off
Output: /home/james/tmp/builder/gluster/builder.img
Output size: 40.0G
Output format: qcow2
Total usable space: 38.2G
Free space: 37.3G (97%)
Running convert...
Running tar...
./Vagrantfile
./metadata.json
./box.img

real	9m10.523s
user	2m23.282s
sys	0m37.109s
Mon Jan 20 11:06:46 EST 2014
$

If you have any other questions, please let me know!

Happy hacking,

James

PS: Be careful when writing Makefile‘s. They can be dangerous if used improperly, and in fact I once took out part of my lib/ directory by running one. Woops!

UPDATE: This technique now exists in it’s own repo here: https://github.com/purpleidea/vagrant-builder

Automatically deploying GlusterFS with Puppet-Gluster + Vagrant!

Posted on January 8, 2014 by purpleidea

Puppet-Gluster was always about automating the deployment of GlusterFS. Getting your own Puppet server and the associated infrastructure running was never included “out of the box“. Today, it is! (This is big news!)

I’ve used Vagrant to automatically build these GlusterFS clusters. I’ve tested this with Fedora 20, and vagrant-libvirt. This won’t work with Fedora 19 because of bz#876541. I recommend first reading my earlier articles for Vagrant and Fedora:

Once you’re comfortable with the material in the above articles, we can continue…

The short answer:

$ sudo service nfs start
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-gluster.git
$ cd puppet-gluster/vagrant/gluster/
$ vagrant up puppet && sudo -v && vagrant up

Once those commands finish, you should have four running gluster hosts, and a puppet server. The gluster hosts will still be building. You can log in and tail -F log files, or watch -n 1 gluster status commands.

The whole process including the one-time downloads took about 30 minutes. If you’ve got faster internet that I do, I’m sure you can cut that down to under 20. Building the gluster hosts themselves probably takes about 15 minutes.

Enjoy your new Gluster cluster!

Screenshots!

I took a few screenshots to make this more visual for you. I like to have virt-manager open so that I can visually see what’s going on:

The annex{1..4} machines are building in parallel. The valleys happened when the machines were waiting for the vagrant DHCP server (dnsmasq).

Here we can see two puppet runs happening on annex1 and annex4.

Notice the two peaks on the puppet server which correspond to the valleys on annex{1,4}.

Here’s another example, with four hosts working in parallel:

Can you answer why the annex machines have two peaks? Why are the second peaks bigger?

Tell me more!

Okay, let’s start with the command sequence shown above.

$ sudo service nfs start

This needs to be run once if the NFS server on your host is not already running. It is used to provide folder synchronization for the Vagrant guest machines. I offer more information about the NFS synchronization in an earlier article.

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-gluster.git

This will pull down the Puppet-Gluster source, and all the necessary submodules.

$ cd puppet-gluster/vagrant/gluster/

The Puppet-Gluster source contains a vagrant subdirectory. I’ve included a gluster subdirectory inside it, so that your machines get a sensible prefix. In the future, this might not be necessary.

$ vagrant up puppet && sudo -v && vagrant up

This is where the fun stuff happens. You’ll need a base box image to run machines with Vagrant. Luckily, I’ve already built one for you, and it is generously hosted by the Gluster community.

The very first time you run this Vagrant command, it will download this image automatically, install it and then continue the build process. This initial box download and installation only happens once. Subsequent Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant deploys and re-deploys won’t need to re-download the base image!

This command starts by building the puppet server. Vagrant might use sudo to prompt you for root access. This is used to manage your /etc/exports file. After the puppet server is finished building, we refresh the sudo cache to avoid bug #2680.

The last vagrant up command starts up the remaining gluster hosts in parallel, and kicks off the initial puppet runs. As I mentioned above, the gluster hosts will still be building. Puppet automatically waits for the cluster to “settle” and enter a steady state (no host/brick changes) before it creates the first volume. You can log in and tail -F log files, or watch -n 1 gluster status commands.

At this point, your cluster is running and you can do whatever you want with it! Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant is meant to be easy. If this wasn’t easy, or you can think of a way to make this better, let me know!

I want N hosts, not 4:

By default, this will build four (4) gluster hosts. I’ve spent a lot of time writing a fancy Vagrantfile, to give you speed and configurability. If you’d like to set a different number of hosts, you’ll first need to destroy the hosts that you’ve built already:

$ vagrant destroy annex{1..4}

You don’t have to rebuild the puppet server because this command is clever and automatically cleans the old host entries from it! This makes re-deploying even faster!

Then, run the vagrant up command with the --gluster-count=<N> argument. Example:

$ vagrant up --gluster-count=8

This is also configurable in the puppet-gluster.yaml file which will appear in your vagrant working directory. Remember that before you change any configuration option, you should destroy the affected hosts first, otherwise vagrant can get confused about the current machine state.

I want to test a different GlusterFS version:

By default, this will use the packages from:

https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/LATEST/

but if you’d like to pick a specific GlusterFS version you can do so with the --gluster-version=<version> argument. Example:

$ vagrant up --gluster-version='3.4.2-1.el6'

This is also stored, and configurable in the puppet-gluster.yaml file.

Does (repeating) this consume a lot of bandwidth?

Not really, no. There is an initial download of about 450MB for the base image. You’ll only ever need to download this again if I publish an updated version.

Each deployment will hit a public mirror to download the necessary puppet, GlusterFS and keepalived packages. The puppet server caused about 115MB of package downloads, and each gluster host needed about 58MB.

The great thing about this setup, is that it is integrated with vagrant-cachier, so that you don’t have to re-download packages. When building the gluster hosts in parallel (the default), each host will have to download the necessary packages into a separate directory. If you’d like each host to share the same cache folder, and save yourself 58MB or so per machine, you’ll need to build in series. You can do this with:

$ vagrant up --no-parallel

I chose speed over preserving bandwidth, so I do not recommend this option. If your ISP has a bandwidth cap, you should find one that isn’t crippled.

Subsequent re-builds won’t download any packages that haven’t already been downloaded.

What should I look for?

Once the vagrant commands are done running, you’ll want to look at something to see how your machines are doing. I like to log in and run different commands. I usually log in like this:

$ vcssh --screen root@annex{1..4}

I explain how to do this kind of magic in an earlier post. I then run some of the following commands:

# tail -F /var/log/messages

This lets me see what the machine is doing. I can see puppet runs and other useful information fly by.

# ip a s eth2

This lets me check that the VIP is working correctly, and which machine it’s on. This should usually be the first machine.

# ps auxww | grep again.[py]

This lets me see if puppet has scheduled another puppet run. My scripts automatically do this when they decide that there is still building (deployment) left to do. If you see a python again.py process, this means it is sleeping and will wake up to continue shortly.

# gluster peer status

This lets me see which hosts have connected, and what state they’re in.

# gluster volume info

This lets me see if Puppet-Gluster has built me a volume yet. By default it builds one distributed volume named puppet.

I want to configure this differently!

Okay, you’re more than welcome to! All of the scripts can be customized. If you want to configure the volume(s) differently, you’ll want to look in the:

puppet-gluster/vagrant/gluster/puppet/manifests/site.pp

file. The gluster::simple class is well-documented, and can be configured however you like. If you want to do more serious hacking, have a look at the Vagrantfile, the source, and the submodules. Of course the GlusterFS source is a great place to hack too!

The network block, domain, and other parameters are all configurable inside of the Vagrantfile. I’ve tried to use sensible defaults where possible. I’m using example.com as the default domain. Yes, this will work fine on your private network. DNS is currently configured with the /etc/hosts file. I wrote some magic into the Vagrantfile so that the slow /etc/hosts shell provisioning only has to happen once per machine! If you have a better, functioning, alternative, please let me know!

What’s the greatest number of machines this will scale to?

Good question! I’d like to know too! I know that GlusterFS probably can’t scale to 1000 hosts yet. Keepalived can’t support more than 256 priorities, therefore Puppet-Gluster can’t scale beyond that count until a suitable fix can be found. There are likely some earlier limits inside of Puppet-Gluster due to maximum command line length constraints that you’ll hit. If you find any, let me know and I’ll patch them. Patches now cost around seven karma points. Other than those limits, there’s the limit of my hardware. Since this is all being virtualized on a lowly X201, my tests are limited. An upgrade would be awesome!

Can I use this to test QA releases, point releases and new GlusterFS versions?

Absolutely! That’s the idea. There are two caveats:

Automatically testing QA releases isn’t supported until the QA packages have a sensible home on download.gluster.org or similar. This will need a change to:
```
https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-gluster/blob/master/manifests/repo.pp#L18
```
The gluster community is working on this, and as soon as a solution is found, I’ll patch Puppet-Gluster to support it. If you want to disable automatic repository management (in gluster::simple) and manage this yourself with the vagrant shell provisioner, you’re able to do so now.
It’s possible that new releases introduce bugs, or change things in a backwards incompatible way that breaks Puppet-Gluster. If this happens, please let me know so that something can get patched. That’s what testing is for!

You could probably use this infrastructure to test GlusterFS builds automatically, but that’s a project that would need real funding.

Updating the puppet source:

If you make a change to the puppet source, but you don’t want to rebuild the puppet virtual machine, you don’t have to. All you have to do is run:

$ vagrant provision puppet

This will update the puppet server with any changes made to the source tree at:

puppet-gluster/vagrant/gluster/puppet/

Keep in mind that the modules subdirectory contains all the necessary puppet submodules, and a clone of puppet-gluster itself. You’ll first need to run make inside of:

puppet-gluster/vagrant/gluster/puppet/modules/

to refresh the local clone. To see what’s going on, or to customize the process, you can look at the Makefile.

Client machines:

At the moment, this doesn’t build separate machines for gluster client use. You can either mount your gluster pool from the puppet server, another gluster server, or if you add the right DNS entries to your /etc/hosts, you can mount the volume on your host machine. If you really want Vagrant to build client machines, you’ll have to persuade me.

What about firewalls?

Normally I use shorewall to manage the firewall. It integrates well with Puppet-Gluster, and does a great job. For an unexplained reason, it seems to be blocking my VRRP (keepalived) traffic, and I had to disable it. I think this is due to a libvirt networking bug, but I can’t prove it yet. If you can help debug this issue, please let me know! To reproduce it, enable the firewall and shorewall directives in:

puppet-gluster/vagrant/gluster/puppet/manifests/site.pp

and then get keepalived to work.

Re-provisioning a machine after a long wait throws an error:

You might be hitting: vagrant-cachier #74. If you do, there is an available workaround.

Keepalived shows “invalid passwd!” messages in the logs:

This is expected. This happens because we build a distributed password for use with keepalived. Before the cluster state has settled, the password will be different from host to host. Only when the cluster is coherent will the password be identical everywhere, which incidentally is the only time when the VIP matters.

How did you build that awesome base image?

I used virt-builder, some scripts, and a clever Makefile. I’ll be publishing this code shortly. Hasn’t this been enough to keep you busy for a while?

Are you still here?

If you’ve read this far, then good for you! I’m sorry that it has been a long read, but I figured I would try to answer everyone’s questions in advance. I’d like to hear your comments! I get very little feedback, and I’ve never gotten a single tip! If you find this useful, please let me know.

Until then,

Happy hacking,

James

Vagrant vsftp and other tricks

Posted on December 21, 2013 by purpleidea

As I previously wrote, I’ve been busy with Vagrant on Fedora with libvirt, and have even been submitting, patches and issues! (This “closed” issue needs solving!) Here are some of the tricks that I’ve used while hacking away.

Default provider:

I should have mentioned this in my earlier article but I forgot: If you’re always using the same provider, you might want to set it as the default. In my case I’m using vagrant-libvirt. To do so, add the following to your .bashrc:

export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt

This helps you avoid having to add --provider=libvirt to all of your vagrant commands.

Aliases:

All good hackers use shell (in my case bash) aliases to make their lives easier. I normally keep all my aliases in .bash_aliases, but I’ve grouped them together with some other vagrant related items in my .bashrc:

alias vp='vagrant provision'
alias vup='vagrant up'
alias vssh='vagrant ssh'
alias vdestroy='vagrant destroy'

Bash functions:

There are some things aliases just can’t do. For those situations, a bash function might be most appropriate. These go inside your .bashrc file. I’d like to share two with you:

Vagrant logging:

Sometimes it’s useful to get more information from the vagrant command that is running. To do this, you can set the VAGRANT_LOG environment variable to info, or debug.

function vlog {
	VAGRANT_LOG=info vagrant "$@" 2> vagrant.log
}

This is usually helpful for debugging a vagrant issue. When you use the vlog command, it works exactly as the normal vagrant command, but it spits out a vagrant.log logfile into the working directory.

Vagrant sftp:

Vagrant provides an ssh command, but it doesn’t offer an sftp command. The sftp tool is fantastically useful when you want to quickly push or pull a file over ssh. First I’ll show you the code so that you can practice reading bash:

# vagrant sftp
function vsftp {
	[ "$1" = '' ] || [ "$2" != '' ] && echo "Usage: vsftp  - vagrant sftp" 1>&2 && return 1
	wd=`pwd`		# save wd, then find the Vagrant project
	while [ "`pwd`" != '/' ] && [ ! -e "`pwd`/Vagrantfile" ] && [ ! -d "`pwd`/.vagrant/" ]; do
		#echo "pwd is `pwd`"
		cd ..
	done
	pwd=`pwd`
	cd $wd
	if [ ! -e "$pwd/Vagrantfile" ] || [ ! -d "$pwd/.vagrant/" ]; then
		echo 'Vagrant project not found!' 1>&2 && return 2
	fi

	d="$pwd/.ssh"
	f="$d/$1.config"

	# if mtime of $f is > than 5 minutes (5 * 60 seconds), re-generate...
	if [ `date -d "now - $(stat -c '%Y' "$f" 2> /dev/null) seconds" +%s` -gt 300 ]; then
		mkdir -p "$d"
		# we cache the lookup because this command is slow...
		vagrant ssh-config "$1" > "$f" || rm "$f"
	fi
	[ -e "$f" ] && sftp -F "$f" "$1"
}

This vsftp command will work from anywhere in the vagrant project root directory or deeper. It does this by first searching upwards until it gets to that directory. When it finds it, it creates a .ssh/ directory there, and stores the proper ssh_config stubs needed for sftp to find the machines. Then the sftp -F command runs, connecting you to your guest machine.

You’ll notice that the first time you connect takes longer than the second time. This is because the vsftp function caches the ssh_config file store operation. You might want to set a different timeout, or disable it altogether. I should also mention that this script searches for a Vagrantfile and .vagrant/ directory to identify the project root. If there is a more “correct” method, please let me know.

I’m particularly proud of this because it was a fun (and useful) hack. This function, and all the above .bashrc material is available here as an easy download.

NFS folder syncing/mounting:

The vagrant-libvirt provider supports one way folder “synchronization” with rsync, and NFS mounting if you want two-way synchronization. I would love if libvirt/vagrant-libvirt had support for real folder sharing via QEMU guest agent and/or 9p. Getting it to work wasn’t trivial. Here’s what I had to do:

Vagrantfile:

Define your “synced_folder” so that you add the :mount_options array:

config.vm.synced_folder "nfs/", "/tmp/nfs", :nfs => true, :mount_options => ['rw', 'vers=3', 'tcp']

When you specify anything in the :mount_options array, it erases all the defaults. The defaults are: vers=3,udp,rw. Obviously, choose your own directory paths! I’d rather see this use NFSv4, but it would have taken slightly more fighting. Please become a warrior today!

Firewall:

Firewalling is not automatic. To work around this, you’ll need to run the following commands before you use your NFS mount:

# systemctl restart nfs-server # this as root, the rest will prompt
$ firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service mountd
$ firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service rpc-bind
$ firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service nfs
$ firewall-cmd --reload

You should only have to do this once, but possibly each reboot. If you like, you can patch those commands to run at the top of your Vagrantfile. If you can help fix this issue permanently, the bug is here.

Sudo:

The use of sudo to automatically edit /etc/exports is a neat trick, but it can cause some problems:

You get internet karma from me if you can help permanently solve any of those three problems.

Package caching:

As part of my deployments, Puppet installs a lot of packages. Repeatedly hitting a public mirror isn’t a very friendly thing to do, it wastes bandwidth, and it’s slower than having the packages locally! Setting up a proper mirror is a nice solution, but it comes with a management overhead. There is really only one piece of software that manages repositories properly, but using pulp has its own overhead, and is beyond the scope of this article. Because we’re not using our own local mirror, this won’t allow you to work entirely offline, as the metadata still needs to get downloaded from the net.

Installation:

As an interim solution, we can use vagrant-cachier. This plugin adds synced_folder‘s to the apt/yum cache directories. Sneaky! Since this requires two-way sync, you’ll need to get NFS folder syncing/mounting working first. Luckily, I’ve already taught you that!

To pass the right options through to vagrant-cachier, you’ll need this patch. I’d recommend first installing the plugin with:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-cachier

and then patching your vagrant-cachier manually. On my machine, the file to patch is found at:

~/.vagrant.d/gems/gems/vagrant-cachier-0.5.0/lib/vagrant-cachier/provision_ext.rb

Vagrantfile:

Here’s what I put in my Vagrantfile:

# NOTE: this doesn't cache metadata, full offline operation not possible
config.cache.auto_detect = true
config.cache.enable :yum		# choose :yum or :apt
if not ARGV.include?('--no-parallel')	# when running in parallel,
	config.cache.scope = :machine	# use the per machine cache
end
config.cache.enable_nfs = true	# sets nfs => true on the synced_folder
# the nolock option is required, otherwise the NFSv3 client will try to
# access the NLM sideband protocol to lock files needed for /var/cache/
# all of this can be avoided by using NFSv4 everywhere. die NFSv3, die!
config.cache.mount_options = ['rw', 'vers=3', 'tcp', 'nolock']

Since multiple package managers operating on the same cache can cause locking issues, this plugin lets you decide if you want a shared cache for all machines, or if you want separate caches. I know that when I use the --no-parallel option it’s safe (enough) to use a common cache because Puppet does all the package installations, and they all happen during each of their first provisioning runs which are themselves sequential.

This isn’t perfect, it’s a hack, but hacks are fun, and in this case, very useful. If things really go wrong, it’s easy to rebuild everything! I still think a few sneaky bugs remain in vagrant-cachier with libvirt, so please find, report, and patch them if you can, although it might be NFS that’s responsible.

Puppet integration:

Integration with Puppet makes this all worthwhile. There are two scenarios:

You’re using a puppetmaster, and you care about things like exported resources and multi-machine systems.
You don’t have a puppetmaster, and you’re running standalone “single machine” code.

The correct answer is #1. Standalone Puppet code is bad for a few reasons:

It neglects the multi-machine nature of servers, and software.
You’re not able to use useful features like exported resources.
It’s easy to (unknowingly) write code that won’t work with a puppetmaster.

If you’d like to see some code which was intentionally written to only work without a puppetmaster (and the puppetmaster friendly equivalent) have a look at my Pushing Puppet material.

There is one good reason for standalone Puppet code, and that is: bootstrapping. In particular, bootstrapping the Puppet server.

DNS:

You need some sort of working DNS setup for this to function properly. Whether that involves hacking up your /etc/hosts files, using one of the vagrant DNS plugins, or running dnsmasq/bind is up to you. I haven’t found an elegant solution yet, hopefully not telling you what I’ve done will push you to come up with something awesome!

The :puppet_server provisioner:

This is the vagrant (puppet agent) provisioner that lets you talk to a puppet server. Here’s my config:

vm.vm.provision :puppet_server do |puppet|
	puppet.puppet_server = 'puppet'
	puppet.options = '--test'    # see the output
end

I’ve added the --test option so that I can see the output go by in my console. I’ve also disabled the puppet service on boot in my base machine image, so that it doesn’t run before I get the chance to watch it. If your base image already has the puppet service running on boot, you can disable it with a shell provisioner. That’s it!

The :puppet provisioner:

This is the standalone vagrant (puppet apply) provisioner. It seems to get misused quite a lot! As I mentioned, I’m only using it to bootstrap my puppet server. That’s why it’s a useful provisioner. Here’s my config:

vm.vm.provision :puppet do |puppet|
	puppet.module_path = 'puppet/modules'
	puppet.manifests_path = 'puppet/manifests'
	puppet.manifest_file = 'site.pp'
	# custom fact
	puppet.facter = {
		'vagrant' => '1',
	}
end

The puppet/{modules,manifests} directories should exist in your project root. I keep the puppet/modules/ directory fresh with a make script that rsync’s code in from my git directories, but that’s purely a personal choice. I added the custom fact as an example. All that’s left is for this code to build a puppetmaster!

Building a puppetmaster:

Here’s my site.pp:

node puppet {	# puppetmaster

	class { '::puppet::server':
		pluginsync => true,	# do we want to enable pluginsync?
		storeconfigs => true,	# do we want to enable storeconfigs?
		autosign => ['*'],	# NOTE: this is a temporary solution
		#repo => true,		# automatic repos (DIY for now)
		start => true,
	}

	class { '::puppet::deploy':
		path => '/vagrant/puppet/',	# puppet folder is put here...
		backup => false,		# don't use puppet to backup...
	}
}

As you can see, I include two classes. The first one installs and configures the puppetmaster, puppetdb, and so on. The second class runs an rsync from the vagrant deployed /vagrant/puppet/ directory to the proper directories inside of /etc/puppet/ and wherever else is appropriate. Each time I want to push new puppet code, I run vp puppet and then vp <host> of whichever host I want to test. You can even combine the two commands into a one-liner with && if you’d like.

The puppet-puppet module:

This is the hairy part. I’ve always had an issue with this module. I recently ripped out support for a lot of the old puppet 0.24 era features, and I’ve only since tested it on the recent 3.x series. A lot has changed from version to version, so it has been hard to follow this and keep it sane. There are serious improvements that could be made to the code. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re okay hacking on Puppet code:

https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-puppet

Most importantly:

This was a long article! I could have split it up into multiple posts, gotten more internet traffic karma, and would have seemed like a much more prolific blogger as a result, but I figured you’d prefer it all in one big lot, and without any suspense. Prove me right by leaving me a tip, and giving me your feedback.

Happy hacking!

James

PS: You’ll want to be able to follow along with everything in this article if you want to use the upcoming Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant infrastructure that I’ll be releasing.

PPS: Heh heh heh…

PPPS: Get it? Vagrant -> Oscar the Grouch -> Muppets -> Puppet

The Technical Blog of James

Technical articles, writeups and discussion!

Tag Archives: vagrant-libvirt

Thanking Oh-My-Vagrant contributors for version 1.0.0

Vagrant and Oh-My-Vagrant on RHEL7

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

Docker containers in Oh-My-Vagrant

Introducing: Oh My Vagrant!

Vagrant on Fedora with libvirt (reprise)

Screencasts of Puppet-Gluster + Vagrant

Building base images for Vagrant with a Makefile

Automatically deploying GlusterFS with Puppet-Gluster + Vagrant!

Vagrant vsftp and other tricks