Better support for non-Linux guests

[Andrew Pennebaker]

Vagrant really shines when it unlocks new capabilities, like running Linux applications from Windows! Now that Docker has supplanted Vagrant for Linux applications, I think Vagrant has room to grow for non-Linux guests. For example, BSD images cannot by run by Docker from Linux hosts. So there are gaps in a build bot sense that Vagrant is ideal for filling.

I’d like to use Vagrant to help setup build bots for several OS’s, so that C-style applications can be ported more automatedly for many kinds of users. However working FreeBSD, macOS / Darwin, and Windows boxes are hard to come by. Licensing aside, the boxes that are available are sometimes closed source (not even a Vagrantfile available), and other boxes fail to successfully vagrant up. I think if the Vagrant community were to promote these OS’s to first tier support, Vagrant would find higher use in CI setups, especially for systems languages!

I’m looking for help getting the FreeBSD box working in macOS, for some reason the dang thing keeps bugging out :/

P.S., I may prefer *nix, but I am keen to support Mac and Windows users for my applications. Does anyone know if Apple and/or Microsoft publish or license a minimal development Vagrant box or some other VM format image?

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

hello

vagrant is a tool, that can use several providers (virtualbox, docker, vmware, cloud, etc)

if there are not boxes available, and you use them already without vagrant, why not create your own vagrant box ?

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[Joaquin Menchaca]

For Mac OS X and Windows, you will have troubles, because of licenses.  Apple exclusively does not support it, and it is very advanced to get Mac OS X to work.  As for Windows, because of licenses, each system is a tailor fix to the license holder. Microsoft has made some vagrant images available (eval versions) to be used for testing.  But these don't work easily, you need to have a well crafted Vagrantfile to support them, which requires intermediate-advance vagrant knowledge.  There are some published Vagrantfiles for Microsoft's downloading vagrant boxes.

As for FreeBSD or other *nix, this depends on what the community will bear or has interests in doing, as well as time/commitment.  The boxes I experimented with don't follow the guidelines for building vagrant boxes, and they require intermediate FreeBSD knowledge to be able to use it correctly.  To publish something on a regular basis is a strong commitment to constantly test and support new upstream releases.  Vagrant is not the ideal to build a CI-CD pipeline, other tools, before with VeeWee and now with Packer.

It would be nice if those behind the OSes had vagrant support as apart of their release process.  But for Open Source, it's just a matter of volunteerism, as usually they just scrape with limited resources.  For Apple, Microsoft, it depends likely on their profit motives.  Do they get money for supporting downloadable vagrant boxes?  Microsoft has at least makes https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/ (previously modern.ie) available.  Apple, well, disposable computing, not in their interests.

For Vagrantfiles for the Windows boxes, you can google modern.ie vagrantfile) .  I did a quick search and found:

• https://github.com/markhuber/modern-ie-vagrant
• https://gist.github.com/andreptb/57e388df5e881937e62a
• https://github.com/hugsy/modern.ie-vagrant

After adding one of these Windows boxes, you could possibly use the Packer virtualbox-ovf provider to extract the existing Windows system, from $HOME/.vagrant.d/boxes/$BOX_NAME/$VERSION/$VMTYPE/box.ovf.  From there you can add the stuff Microsoft didn't add.  For the other *nixes or Linux distros that didn't follow the vagrant guidelines, you could use the same strategy.

- Joaquin Menchaca