9.9 KiB
vagrant-cachier
A Vagrant plugin that helps you reduce the amount of coffee you drink while waiting for boxes to be provisioned by sharing a common package cache among similiar VM instances. Kinda like vagrant-apt_cache or this magical snippet but targetting multiple package managers and Linux distros.
Installation
Make sure you have Vagrant 1.2+ and run:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-cachier
Usage
The easiest way to set things up is just to enable cache buckets auto detection
from within your Vagrantfile
:
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'your-box'
config.cache.auto_detect = true
# If you are using VirtualBox, you might want to enable NFS for shared folders
# config.cache.enable_nfs = true
end
For more information about available buckets, please see the configuration section below.
Compatible providers
- Vagrant's built in VirtualBox provider
- vagrant-lxc
- VMware providers with NFS enabled (See GH-24 for more info)
How does it work?
Right now the plugin does not make any assumptions for you and you have to
configure things properly from your Vagrantfile
. Please have a look at
the available cache buckets section below for more
information.
Under the hood, the plugin will monkey patch Vagrant::Builtin::Provision
and
will set things up for each configured cache bucket before running each defined
provisioner and after all provisioners are done. Before halting the machine,
it will revert the changes required to set things up by hooking into calls to
Vagrant::Builtin::GracefulHalt
so that you can repackage the machine for others
to use without requiring users to install the plugin as well.
Cache buckets will be available from /tmp/vagrant-cachier
on your guest and
the appropriate folders will get symlinked to the right path after the machine is
up but right before it gets provisioned. We could potentially do it on one go
and share bucket's folders directly to the right path if we were only using VirtualBox
since it shares folders after booting the machine, but the LXC provider does that
as part of the boot process (shared folders are actually lxc-start
parameters)
and as of now we are not able to get some information that this plugin requires
about the guest machine before it is actually up and running.
Please keep in mind that this plugin won't do magic, if you are compiling things during provisioning or manually downloading packages that does not fit into a "cache bucket" you won't see that much of improvement.
Benchmarks / shameless plug
Please have a look at this blog post for the numbers I've got down here.
Configurations
Auto detect supported cache buckets
As described on the usage section above, you can enable automatic detection of
supported cache "buckets" by adding the code below to
your Vagrantfile
:
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
# ...
config.cache.auto_detect = true
end
This will make vagrant-cachier do its best to find out what is supported on the guest machine and will set buckets accordingly.
Cache scope
By default downloaded packages will get stored on a folder scoped to base boxes
under your $HOME/.vagrant.d/cache
. The idea is to leverage the cache by allowing
downloaded packages to be reused across projects. So, if your Vagrantfile
has
something like:
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-box'
end
The cached files will be stored under $HOME/.vagrant.d/cache/some-box
.
If you are on a multi VM environment,
there is a huge chance that you'll end up having issues by sharing the same bucket
across different machines. For example, if you apt-get install
from two machines
at "almost the same time" you are probably going to hit a SystemError: Failed to lock /var/cache/apt/archives/lock
.
To work around that, you can set the scope to be based on machines:
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-box'
config.cache.scope = :machine
end
This will tell vagrant-cachier to download packages to .vagrant/machines/<machine-name>/cache
on your current project directory.
Available cache "buckets"
System package managers
APT
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-debian-box'
config.cache.enable :apt
end
Used by Debian-like Linux distros, will get configured under guest's /var/cache/apt/archives
.
Please note that to avoid re-downloading packages, you should avoid apt-get clean
as much as possible in order to make a better use of the cache, even if you are
packaging a box
Zypper
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-suse-box'
config.cache.enable :zypper
end
Used by SuSE guests, will get configured under guest's /var/cache/zypp/packages
. It will
also make sure that keep-packages
is enabled
for all repositories.
Yum
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-centos-box'
config.cache.enable :yum
end
Used by CentOS guests, will get configured under guest's /var/cache/yum
. It will
also make sure that keepcache
is set to
1
on guest's /etc/yum.conf
.
Pacman
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-arch-linux-box'
config.cache.enable :pacman
end
Used by Arch Linux, will get configured under guest's /var/cache/pacman/pkg
.
Chef
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-box-using-chef-provisioner'
config.cache.enable :chef
end
When a Chef provisioner is detected, this bucket caches the default
file_cache_path
directory, /var/chef/cache
. Requires Vagrant 1.2.4+.
RubyGems
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-box-with-ruby-installed'
config.cache.enable :gem
end
Compatible with probably with any type of guest distro, will hook into the cache
folder under the result of running gem env gemdir
as the default SSH user (usualy
vagrant
) on your guest. If you use rbenv / rvm on the guest machine, make sure
it is already installed before enabling the bucket, otherwise you won't benefit
from this plugin.
RVM
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-box-with-rvm-installed'
config.cache.enable :rvm
end
Compatible with probably with any type of linux guest distro, will hook into the cache
folder under the result of running rvm info
as the default SSH user (usualy
vagrant
) on your guest. If you use rvm on the guest machine, make sure
it is already installed before enabling the bucket, otherwise you won't benefit
from this plugin.
npm
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-box-with-nodejs-installed'
config.cache.enable :npm
end
Compatible with probably any type of linux guest distro, will hook into npm's
cache directory under the result of running npm config get cache
as
the default SSH user (usually vagrant
) on your guest.
If you use
nvm / n
on the guest machine, make sure it is already installed before enabling
the bucket, otherwise you won't benefit from this plugin.
Composer
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-box-with-php-installed'
config.cache.enable :composer
end
Compatible with probably any type of linux guest distro, will cache guests'
$HOME/.composer
if PHP is detected.
APT-CACHER
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = 'some-debian-box'
config.cache.enable :apt_cacher
end
This is useful, if you are using containers inside your VMs, e.g VirtualBox -> LXC.
This would allow you to reuse packages without sharing folder inside VirtualBox. Only
works with NFS-shared folders (since vboxsf
is enforcing vagrant
-user and apt-cacher
is running under apt-cacher-ng
user)
# install apt-cacher on (Host)-VM
$ sudo apt-get install apt-cacher-ng
# get the IP for eth0 interface
$ ifconfig eth0 |grep "inet addr"|awk '{print $2}' |cut -c6-20
# configure mirror on for your docker/LXC instances:
$ echo 'Acquire::http { Proxy "http://X.X.X.X:3142"; };' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10mirror
# check, if working by tailing log on (Host)-VM, while installing packages on (Guest)-VMs
$ tail -f /var/log/apt-cacher-ng/apt-cacher.log
Used by Debian-like Linux distros, will get configured under guest's /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng
.
Finding out disk space used by buckets
TODO
$ vagrant cache stats
Cleaning up cache buckets
TODO
$ vagrant cache clean apt
Development
If you want to install the plugin from sources:
git clone https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-cachier.git
cd vagrant-cachier
bundle install
bundle exec rake build
vagrant plugin install pkg/vagrant-cachier-VERSION.gem
There are also some Bats tests that basically
acts as a sanity check that you can run with
bats spec/acceptance
in case you are planning to submit a Pull Request :) Just
keep in mind that it might take a while to run if you are using the default
VirtualBox provider.
Contributing
- Fork it
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature
) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature'
) - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature
) - Create new Pull Request