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.

For example:

git clone https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc.git
cd vagrant-lxc/boxes
PUPPET=1 CHEF=1 make precise

Will build a Ubuntu Precise x86_64 box with latest Puppet and Chef pre-installed, please refer to the scripts 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	DESCRIPTION
lxc-template	Script responsible for creating and setting up the container (used with lxc-create), a "generic script" is provided along with project's source.
rootfs.tar.gz	Compressed container rootfs tarball (need to remeber to pass in --numeric-owner when creating it)
lxc.conf	File passed in to lxc-create -f
lxc-config	Box specific configuration to be appended to the container's config file
metadata.json	Required by Vagrant

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 provided with the .box package