An Example Provisioning of HACKT on a Centos 7 VM using Vagrant and Ansible

1   Install Vagrant and Ansible

Vagrant is a nice way to bring up a virtual machine (running through VirtualBox, for example) from predefined 'boxes' very easily. Ansible is a separate provisioning system that lets you easily, and in a reproducible and documented fashion, customize these virtual machines, and only requires SSH running on the target system. Vagrant also ships with some nice bindings to Ansible, allowing for really easy provisioning of the deployed boxes. Even more, you don't even need Ansible installed on your local machine as Vagrant will install it automatically in your virtual machine and execute the provisioning inside it, which is a really lightweight way to do it.

I won't go into the details of installing these tools, but they were very straight-forward to get up and running.

2   Get the vanilla virtual machine up

First, just go to a directory where you will be keeping all the files needed to build your server. Then, within that directory, do the following:

vagrant init
vagrant box add centos/7

The first writes a template Vagrantfile to your current directory, that will contain the configuration information for customizing your new VM. The second command downloads a pre-built CentOS 7 system from the Vagrant community and stores it in your $HOME/.vagrant.d/boxes

Next, we want to configure and provision our VM that will be brought up from this downloaded image. So, edit your Vagrantfile, remove all the crud, and insert the following lines:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
    config.vm.box = "centos/7"
end

Now, run the following command to start your VM:

vagrant up

This will bring up your new CentOS VM, as well as rsync your current directory to the VM under /home/vagrant/sync.

You can ssh into the VM by doing:

vagrant ssh

3   Getting Ansible Provisioning working

To enable Ansible provisioning inside your , add the following lines to your Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
      config.vm.box = "centos/7"

      config.vm.provision "ansible_local" do |ansible|
          ansible.provisioning_path = "/home/vagrant/sync"
          ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"
      end
end

The playbook.yml is where we'll write the Ansible instructions (in YAML format) that will provision this VM. This file should stay in your current directory, but when Vagrant brings up the VM, it will rsync this file to your /home/vagrant/sync directory inside your VM, so that's why we need the provisioning_path option specified.

Also note that the configuration to Vagrant is specifying ansible_local, which means Vagrant will install and run Ansible inside the VM.

Next, we'll build up the playbook.yml file step by step.

---
- hosts: all
  connection: local

vars:
    src_dir: /home/vagrant/src
    hackt_dir: "{{ src_dir }}/hackt"

tasks:
  - name: Update yum
    yum: name=* state=latest
    sudo: true

  - name: Install packages
    yum: name="{{ item }}" state=present
    sudo: true
    with_items:
          - "@Development tools"
          - guile
          - libtool-ltdl-devel
          - wget
          - texinfo

- name: Remove newest bison
  yum: name=bison state=removed
  sudo: true

- name: Create src directory
  file: path={{ src_dir }} state=directory

- name: Download old bison for hackt
  get_url: url=http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.3.tar.gz dest={{ src_dir }}

- name: Unzip bison
  unarchive: src={{ src_dir }}/bison-2.3.tar.gz dest={{ src_dir }}

- name: Build and install new bison
  shell: "{{ item }}"
  args:
      chdir: "{{ src_dir }}/bison-2.3"
  with_items:
      - ./configure
      - make
      - sudo make install

- name: Get HACKT
  git: repo=https://github.com/fangism/hackt.git
       dest={{ src_dir }}/hackt
       version=tags/SNAPSHOT-RELEASE-20141024

- name: Bootstrap HACKT
  shell: ./bootstrap
  args:
      chdir: "{{ hackt_dir }}"
      creates: "{{ hackt_dir }}/configure"

- name: Build HACKT
  shell: "{{ item }}"
  args:
      chdir: "{{ hackt_dir }}"
      creates: /usr/local/bin/hackt
  with_items:
      - env CXXFLAGS='-Wno-error' ./configure
      - make
      - sudo make install

4   Final steps and other tips

And that's basically it, for a very simple provisioning system. Ansible has some really cool features that we haven't touched on here, and it's probably a good idea to breakdown the playbook into a more hierarchical structure. But for now, here's the complete playbook:

---
- hosts: all
  connection: local

  vars:
      src_dir: /home/vagrant/src
      hackt_dir: "{{ src_dir }}/hackt"

  tasks:
    - name: Update yum
      yum: name=* state=latest
      sudo: true

    - name: Install packages
      yum: name="{{ item }}" state=present
      sudo: true
      with_items:
            - "@Development tools"
            - guile
            - libtool-ltdl-devel
            - wget
            - texinfo

    - name: Remove newest bison
      yum: name=bison state=removed
      sudo: true

    - name: Create src directory
      file: path={{ src_dir }} state=directory

    - name: Download old bison for hackt
      get_url: url=http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.3.tar.gz dest={{ src_dir }}

    - name: Unzip bison
      unarchive: src={{ src_dir }}/bison-2.3.tar.gz dest={{ src_dir }}

    - name: Build and install new bison
      shell: "{{ item }}"
      args:
          chdir: "{{ src_dir }}/bison-2.3"
      with_items:
          - ./configure
          - make
          - sudo make install

    - name: Get HACKT
      git: repo=https://github.com/fangism/hackt.git
           dest={{ src_dir }}/hackt
           version=tags/SNAPSHOT-RELEASE-20141024

    - name: Bootstrap HACKT
      shell: ./bootstrap
      args:
          chdir: "{{ hackt_dir }}"
          creates: "{{ hackt_dir }}/configure"

    - name: Build HACKT
      shell: "{{ item }}"
      args:
          chdir: "{{ hackt_dir }}"
      with_items:
          - env CXXFLAGS='-Wno-error' ./configure
          - make
          - sudo make install

Some further useful commands and tips are below.

config.vm.synced_folder "share", "/share/dev", type: "rsync"