vagrant-spk fails if virtualbox not available

[paulproteus]

@tdfischer claims to have run into this. Looking into it now to see if I can reproduce it.

[paulproteus]

FWIW, she's running this on Fedora.

I can reproduce on Debian, with Virtualbox not installed. I get the following msesage:

Calling 'vagrant' 'up' in /home/paulproteus/projects/php-app-to-package-for-sandstorm/.sandstorm
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'libvirt' provider...
==> default: Box 'debian/jessie64' could not be found. Attempting to find and install...
    default: Box Provider: libvirt
    default: Box Version: >= 0
==> default: Loading metadata for box 'debian/jessie64'
    default: URL: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/debian/jessie64
The box you're attempting to add doesn't support the provider
you requested. Please find an alternate box or use an alternate
provider. Double-check your requested provider to verify you didn't
simply misspell it.

If you're adding a box from HashiCorp's Atlas, make sure the box is
released.

Name: debian/jessie64
Address: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/debian/jessie64
Requested provider: [:libvirt]

@zarvox any chance you can ask the nice debian/jessie64 people to create a libvirt box, and/or help them with that? I hope that a libvirt backend won't cause a huge amount of divergence; I'm curious you think that would be a pain to maintain, as an alternate backend for vagrant-spk.

If it won't be a huge pain, it'd be nice to offer this for people who don't like VirtualBox.

[zarvox]

Yeah, this is definitely worthwhile and already on my radar. I pinged the #debian-cloud folks a while back, but didn't get a reply, so I should probably follow up via email. If the Debian vagrant box maintainers don't want to write the patches, I can write them.

As for maintenance, I also use Fedora and (almost exclusively) the libvirt provider, by taking the VirtualBox debian/jessie64 box and using vagrant mutate. So I can say with confidence that the libvirt backend works, and is generally quite reliable and stable once you fetch a box. Note that for the folder sharing to work as desired you may need to configure libvirt to run in a less-secure mode; specifically, you'll need qemu to run as root and with CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE; in /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf, set clear_emulator_capabilities = 0.

Sadly, the vagrant plugin installation thing seems to be slightly wonky on Fedora, so I actually debootstrap a Debian root and do the vagrant mutute from within systemd-nspawn then import the .box file.

I'd much rather this all work out of the box, though!

[paulproteus]

While we're waiting, Drew, I wonder if it would be reasonable for you to publish your vagrant-mutate base box images somewhere, and check for libvirt, and if using libvirt, configure the Vagrantfile to use your mutated box?

Curious what you think.

[zarvox]

I suppose I could try overriding box_url and such based on provider, for the time being. I worry a little that we won't pull in updates from upstream unless I'm rebuilding that box on a regular basis, but it probably makes sense for now.

[paulproteus]

For what it's worth, it's not clear to me that we actually particularly need automatic updates from upstream for the boxes. Updates from upstream is what broke vagrant-spk w/r/t the Puppet stuff. But I guess it's nice to have the updates.

[zarvox]

Here's a workaround for now:

vagrant box add --provider libvirt --name debian/jessie64 --checksum-type sha256 --checksum e27b8b97f8f87ea5cf79a33bff43a3787f6c33c7ef2f70689b3425329d05c916 http://dl.zarvox.org/debian-jessie64-libvirt-8.1.0.box

[samuk]

I've just run into this vm:

• The box 'sandstorm/debian-jessie64' could not be found.

When trying the workaround above I get

An invalid option was specified. The help for this command

[edit] I just installed the deb from https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html which seems to have fixed it

[paulproteus]

Interesting - it seems that @samuk had a version of Vagrant in Ubuntu 14.04 that doesn't seem to support the box registry.

[takluyver]

I've also just run into this trying to follow the tutorial on Fedora - even with VirtualBox installed, it seems to be defaulting to libvirt and failing. Trying to download @zarvox's alternative box now.

[takluyver]

I couldn't work out how to make it work with @zarvox's box, but I did manage to make it work with the official image by explicitly telling it to use the virtualbox provider:

vagrant-spk vm up --  --provider virtualbox