Virtual machine images

This is a Packer definition to build a Debian Buster image as a Vagrant box to run with VirtualBox and Vagrant.

This was originally based on deimosfr/packer-debian.

Variants

Different variants can be built by choosing a JSON configuration file (to pass to Packer with the -var-file argument):

• minimal.json: a base image, e.g. good enough to learn the basics of Linux.
• with-docker.json: a similar image to minimal, this time with Docker and docker-compose already installed.

Debian Buster Vagrant box

The images can be built with:

$ packer build -var-file variables/minimal.json debian-buster-virtualbox
$ packer build -var-file variables/with-docker.json debian-buster-virtualbox

The resulting image looks like debian-10.1.0-amd64-virtualbox.box.

Sample Vagrantfile

The created Vagrant box doesn't use the usual vagrant username and password, so you have to specify them in the Vagrantfile:

$ cat Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "debian-10.1.0-amd64-virtualbox.box"
  config.ssh.username = 'debian'
  config.ssh.password = 'debian'
  config.ssh.insert_key = 'true'
end

VirtualBox on NixOS

You nee the following in your configuration.nix (using nix-shell -p virtualbox is not enough; "thu" is my user):

  virtualisation.virtualbox.host.enable = true;
  users.extraGroups.vboxusers.members = [ "thu" ];

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, the referenced Debian version in the debian-stretch file becomes outdated, and should be bumped.

TODO

• Install the VirtualBox guest additions.
• The shutdown command doesn't seem correct: without the sudoers.sh script, Packer shows the usual following line, but hangs.

    virtualbox-iso: [sudo] password for debian: