vagrant-lxc-ng/BOXES.md

vagrant-lxc base boxes

Although the official documentation says it is only supported for VirtualBox environments, you can use the vagrant package command to export a .box file from an existing vagrant-lxc container.

There is also a set of bash scripts that you can use to build base boxes as needed. By default it won't include any provisioning tool and you can pick the ones you want by providing some environment variables. Please refer to the base boxes repository for more information.

"Anatomy" of a box

If you need to go deeper and build your scripts from scratch or if you are interested on knowing what makes a base box for vagrant-lxc, here's what's needed:

Expected .box contents

FILE	REQUIRED?	DESCRIPTION
metadata.json	Yes	Required by Vagrant
rootfs.tar.gz	Yes	Compressed container rootfs tarball (need to remeber to pass in --numeric-owner when creating it)
lxc-template	No, a "generic script" is provided by the plugin if it doesn't exist on the base box	Script responsible for creating and setting up the container (used with lxc-create).
lxc-config	No	Box specific configuration to be appended to the system's generated container config file
lxc.conf	No	File passed in to lxc-create -f

metadata.json

{
  "provider": "lxc",
  "version":  "1.0.0",
  "built-on": "Sat Sep 21 21:10:00 UTC 2013",
  "template-opts": {
    "--arch":    "amd64",
    "--release": "quantal"
  }
}

KEY	REQUIRED?	DESCRIPTION
provider	Yes	Required by Vagrant
version	Yes	Tracks backward incompatibilities
built-on	No	Date / time when the box was packaged for the first time
template-opts	No	Extra options to be passed to the lxc-template script