VAGRANT.md

Testing motherbrain Bootstrapping with Vagrant

One of the things we'd like to do is have a Vagrant or Virtualbox/VMware/etc provisioner, so that you can test provisioning locally. Until this is completed, you can test bootstrapping to a set of Vagrant boxes.

Setup Vagrant

First, make sure you have Vagrant installed by following the directions at vagrantup.com. Test that Vagrant is installed correctly with vagrant -v:

$ vagrant -v
Vagrant version 1.2.2

Create a Vagrantfile

We'll want a Vagrantfile that gives us a box to bootstrap. This file can be anywhere, but it might be best to place it in its own folder, such as motherbrain-boxes. Here's the simplest one possible for our needs:

Vagrant.configure('2') do |config|
  config.vm.box = "opscode-centos-6.3"
  config.vm.box_url = "https://opscode-vm.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/boxes/opscode-centos-6.3.box"
  config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "33.33.33.101"
end

If you wanted more than one box, you could use Ruby to create multiple boxes:

count = 3

Vagrant.configure('2') do |config|
  (1..count).each do |number|
    config.vm.define name do |box|
      box.vm.box = "opscode-centos-6.3"
      box.vm.box_url = "https://opscode-vm.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/boxes/opscode-centos-6.3.box"
      box.vm.hostname = "box#{number}"
      box.vm.network :private_network, ip: "33.33.33.#{100 + number}"
    end
  end
end

This will creates 3 boxes (box1, box2, box3) with sequential IP addresses (33.33.33.101, .102, .103).

A more advanced Vagrantfile can be found at justincampbell/boxen. This provides support for specifying the numbers of boxes on the command line, and automatically modifies your /etc/hosts file with the box hostnames (33.33.33.101 box1).

Start Vagrant boxes

Now just run vagrant up, and you should see the box being created:

motherbrain-boxes$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
[default] Importing base box 'opscode-centos-6.3'...
[default] Matching MAC address for NAT networking...
[default] Setting the name of the VM...
[default] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
[default] Creating shared folders metadata...
[default] Clearing any previously set network interfaces...
[default] Preparing network interfaces based on configuration...
[default] Forwarding ports...
[default] -- 22 => 2222 (adapter 1)
[default] Booting VM...
[default] Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.
[default] VM booted and ready for use!
[default] Configuring and enabling network interfaces...
[default] Mounting shared folders...
[default] -- /vagrant
$

We now have a CentOS 6.3 machine waiting for us at 33.33.33.101.

Configure motherbrain

Next, we need to tell motherbrain to use the Vagrant SSH user and key. Assuming that we're bootstrapping a node with the "ohai" plugin (a simple cookbook with no dependencies), our bootstrap manifest should look like this:

{
  "options": {
    "ssh": {
      "user": "vagrant",
      "keys": ["~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key"]
    }
  },
  "nodes": [
    {
      "groups": ["ohai::default"],
      "hosts": ["33.33.33.101"]
    }
  ]
}

The SSH options above will override those in our motherbrain config. Save this file as vagrant.json.

Bootstrapping

Now we're ready to bootstrap our node. We'll tell motherbrain to bootstrap our plugin (ohai in this case) with our vagrant.json manifest, and a Chef environment of our username with a -vagrant suffix:

ohai$ mb ohai bootstrap vagrant.json -e jcampbell-vagrant
Determining best version of the ohai plugin to use with the jcampbell-vagrant environment. This may take a few seconds...
No environment named jcampbell-vagrant was found. Finding the latest version of the ohai plugin instead. This may take a few second...
using ohai (1.1.8)

Environment 'jcampbell-vagrant' does not exist, would you like to create it? ["y", "n", "q"] ("y") y
  [bootstrap] searching for environment
  [bootstrap] Locking chef_environment:jcampbell-vagrant
  [bootstrap] performing bootstrap on group(s): ["ohai::default"]
  [bootstrap] Unlocking chef_environment:jcampbell-vagrant
  [bootstrap] Success

That's it! motherbrain added our Vagrant box to Chef, set the run list, and ran chef-client on the box.