On Windows, I recommend chocolatey, which you can install by adding the following snippet to your Vagrantfile: config.vm.provision "shell", inline. Let’s take a look at the most popular package manager for macOS and Windows. There are package managers which take away the need for manually-written scripts that download the software’s installation medium and perform a “silent install”. There is a lot of third party off-the-shelf software you may need in your build VM. For me, Windows 10 works fine even with just 2 GB, while macOS is usually atrociously slow with less than 4 GB. You need to experiment with different values. With too little memory (RAM) assigned to the VM, the VM will constantly be using the disk swap partition, which slows down the provision process (and subsequent build script executions) drastically. Fortunately, building your own base box is not very difficult when using Packer, so head over to my article to find out how to build your own box. You certainly don’t want to use such a box only to find out that your application’s source code was leaked to an unknown third party. While using ready-made boxes is convenient, the problem is that anyone can upload boxes to this service – including bad actors who can embed malware into the box, which tracks your activities and sends information to a remote server. In my previous article, How to create a Vagrant box with Packer, I explained why you may not want to use boxes hosted on Vagrant Cloud for building. With Vagrant, your VM is always based on some base box – the immutable image your VM will be instantiated from. Tips and recipes for creating a build runner VM Use a trustworthy base box Since there are many smaller caveats, I’ll provide recipe-like solutions and hints that address these caveats. You cannot possibly forget a step without noticing it quickly. This approach solves all downsides mentioned above! It saves a ton of time to get a build system up for anyone who needs it, you can quickly adapt it to newer versions of the base OS, and the recipe is much more precise than hand-made documentation. Once the Vagrantfile is prepared, getting a ready-to-use build VM is as easy as running vagrant up, and waiting a few hours. All required steps are implemented as shell commands that you put in a Vagrantfile, or helper bash/shell scripts called by Vagrant. Instead of manually creating your build runner I suggest a fully automated approach, using Vagrant. Solution: to create a build runner VM with Vagrant because of data loss or migration to a newer OS version, it takes time again to walk through all steps. Whenever you have to repeat the steps, e.g. Unfortunately, this has several disadvantages: by checking out an older revision of your code that should build without errors, and run your build scripts, verifying that they complete without errors.Ī common approach I often see (and have used myself in the past) is to build these environments by hand, documenting the steps somewhere, e.g.
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