This post will discuss building a CentOs 6.4 vagrant box, and in later posts we will use this box and ansible to further define our machines, such as installing oracle xe.

About Vagrant

Vagrant lets you create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. All too often you will find teams developing off a central server, purely because of the pain of setting up a dev environment. Nothing is automated. There are many challenges with this approach. IMHO this slows down a team, and experimentation is discouraged and you end up “stepping on each others code”.

Vagrant can solve some these challenges, ever started a new project and spent a few days just getting your environment setup? Well with vagrant this should be a thing of the past.

Before you start

You will need some baseline software before we begin. Make sure you have the following installed.

• Git
• Vagrant
• Ansible
• Virtualbox
• Veewee

Lets check we have everything installed

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$ git version
git version 1.8.3.4 (Apple Git-47)
$ vagrant --version
Vagrant 1.3.5
$ VBoxManage --version
4.3.2r90405
$ veewee version
Version : 0.3.12 - use at your own risk

Build a CentOS 6.4 base box

You can find a number of vagrant base boxes online, but i prefer creating one from scratch. We can do that easily with veewee.

First we clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/ismaild/vagrant-boxes.git. I have disabled chef and puppet since we will be using ansible. Feel free to add it back in if you want it, which you can by editing: definitions/CentOS-6.4-x86_64/definition.rb

Veewee will automatically try and download the required ISO files. If you already have them, you can put them in the iso directory and it will not need to download.

• http://yum.singlehop.com/CentOS/6.4/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.4-x86_64-minimal.iso
• http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.2/VBoxGuestAdditions_4.3.2.iso

Just make sure the version of the virtualbox guest additions matches your installed version of virtualbox.

Then run the following commands:

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$ cd vagrant-boxes
$ veewee vbox list
# if no boxes defined
$ veewee vbox define CentOS-6.4-x86_64 CentOS-6.4-x86_64-minimal
# Build the box
$ veewee vbox build CentOS-6.4-x86_64
# Eject the disks from the running VM and shutdown.
# Package the box
$ vagrant package --base CentOS-6.4-x86_64 --output CentOS-6.4-x86_64.box
$ vagrant box add centos-64-x86_64 CentOS-6.4-x86_64.box

Now we have a base CentOS 6.4 box to use. In the next post we will go through setting up oracle with ansible.