Where can I get a box for Rex?

[Matias Nunes]

Hi,

It's been just a couple of days since I found Rex, and now I want to test it with boxes.
As I have read, there are prebuilt boxes, but the site that hosts them is down right now.

Can someone share with me a Centos ova image? It would be very useful to count with it.

Thanks in advance,

Matias

[Paulo Graça]

Hi Matias,

This project had 2 major contributors. And I think they don't have the same availability or are away from the project. 

The work done it's still available, but I'm afraid it doesn't have the same the level of support. You will get this feeling when visiting the website, accessing modules/recipes and it PR list. I've several PR waiting for more than 2 years for any feedback.

There is currently an effort to minimize the project support and maintenance work and I think the path is to have sustainable/self maintained solutions.

Rexify it's a wonderful project, we used it since 2014, with any regrets, and we will continue to use it and contribute to it. Saying this, I hope you don't give up yet on exploring it. 

Answering to your question, perhaps you won't find any pre build virtual machine, since they aren't available. You might follow these instructions: https://box.rexify.org/roll_your_own and create your own and follow the other instructions for setting it up - https://box.rexify.org/guide. I confess I didn't tried yet...

Regards,

Paulo Graça

[Paulo Graça]

Just to reference Eric's notes regarding the future of Rexify:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rex-users/v5nTnGHeNms/e2xzD7c-DwAJ

[Paulo Graça]

Sorry, Erki, not Eric!

[Matias Nunes]

Hello, Paulo.

First of all, thank you very much for taking your time to answer me.

My first message was posted just a couple of days after discovering Rex, but since then I have tested it pretty extensively.

Recently I've started to work on a side project (meaning unsolicited) inside my company, which I believe (and hope) that will change how the company deploys its software into production. Today all the process is done manually, but this is totally unsustainable in the long term.

So far, I'm amazed with how extensive Rex is, meaning that it helps automating the hole process with the flexibility that Perl code gives. Previously my company tried to automate with Ansible, but it wasn't customizable enough for us to use.

Long story short, I'm far from giving up on Rex :)

Regarding the box that I requested, I opted for making such pre-made machines with Vagrant in combination with Rex, and although I haven't developed much that functionality yet, it promises to be a good solution too.

I really appreciate your interest and help, and it's awesome to know that this software in which I have so many hopes put on is actively being used by other people around.

I would like to stay in touch with you, in order to share experiences and get support from each other if you would like to do so.

Thank you again for your time!

Regards from Uruguay.

Matías Nunes

[Paulo Graça]

Sure!

Do you still use rex Matías?

We still use rex in a daily basis to manage our services.

[Ferenc Erki]

Hi everyone,

it's a bit old thread, but I'd like to briefly reflect on the original topic here.

First, box.rexify.org doesn't exist anymore, and I personally see it unlikely to be resurrected under the umbrella of RexOps projects. IMHO maintaining and hosting virtual machine images is best left to other projects who has this service as their main focus (for example like https://www.osboxes.org for VirtualBox and VMware images, and most distros also offer images in various formats on their own). That also allows us to focus more on our own core competency, which is providing an IT automation framework.

That being said, I can imaging there are people in the community who would be interested in building, maintaining and running such image service, and I'd be happy to support them to be successful. So feel free to reach out to us!

Second, the Rex::Virtualization modules underlying the Rex::Box functionality support an URL for the image to be used. That URL could be pointed to these other services providing downloadable images. Furthermore, that URL may have a scheme other than http://, for example "file://path/to/my/image.qcow2", which makes Rex try to use a local image file. I haven't tried ftp:// myself, but I guess it would work similarly as well.

Let us know about your experience! If you encounter a bug or have a feature request, feel free to chat with us on IRC, and/or open GitHub issues.

Happy hacking!

Cheers,

FErki