Vagrant RackSpace Cloud Provider

This is a Vagrant 1.1+ plugin that adds a RackSpace Cloud provider to Vagrant, allowing Vagrant to control and provision machines within RackSpace cloud.

Note: This plugin requires Vagrant 1.1+.

Features

• Boot Rackspace Cloud instances.
• SSH into the instances.
• Provision the instances with any built-in Vagrant provisioner.
• Minimal synced folder support via rsync.

Usage

Install using standard Vagrant 1.1+ plugin installation methods. After installing, vagrant up and specify the rackspace provider. An example is shown below.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-rackspace
...
$ vagrant up --provider=rackspace
...

Of course prior to doing this, you'll need to obtain an Rackspace-compatible box file for Vagrant.

Quick Start

After installing the plugin (instructions above), the quickest way to get started is to actually use a dummy Rackspace box and specify all the details manually within a config.vm.provider block. So first, add the dummy box using any name you want:

$ vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-rackspace/raw/master/dummy.box
...

And then make a Vagrantfile that looks like the following, filling in your information where necessary.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "dummy"

  config.vm.provider :rackspace do |rs|
    rs.username = "YOUR USERNAME"
    rs.api_key  = "YOUR API KEY"
    rs.flavor   = /512MB/
    rs.image    = /Ubuntu/
  end
end

And then run vagrant up --provider=rackspace.

This will start an Ubuntu 12.04 instance in the DFW datacenter region within your account. And assuming your SSH information was filled in properly within your Vagrantfile, SSH and provisioning will work as well.

Note that normally a lot of this boilerplate is encoded within the box file, but the box file used for the quick start, the "dummy" box, has no preconfigured defaults.

Box Format

Every provider in Vagrant must introduce a custom box format. This provider introduces rackspace boxes. You can view an example box in the example_box/ directory. That directory also contains instructions on how to build a box.

The box format is basically just the required metadata.json file along with a Vagrantfile that does default settings for the provider-specific configuration for this provider.

Configuration

This provider exposes quite a few provider-specific configuration options:

• api_key - The API key for accessing Rackspace.
• flavor - The server flavor to boot. This can be a string matching the exact ID or name of the server, or this can be a regular expression to partially match some server flavor.
• image - The server image to boot. This can be a string matching the exact ID or name of the image, or this can be a regular expression to partially match some image.
• endpoint - The endpoint to hit. By default this is DFW.
• public_key_path - The path to a public key to initialize with the remote server. This should be the matching pair for the private key configured with config.ssh.private_key_path on Vagrant.
• server_name - The name of the server within RackSpace Cloud. This defaults to the name of the Vagrant machine (via config.vm.define), but can be overridden with this.
• username - The username with which to access Rackspace.

These can be set like typical provider-specific configuration:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ... other stuff

  config.vm.provider :rackspace do |rs|
    rs.username = "mitchellh"
    rs.api_key  = "foobarbaz"
  end
end

Networks

Networking features in the form of config.vm.network are not supported with vagrant-rackspace, currently. If any of these are specified, Vagrant will emit a warning, but will otherwise boot the Rackspace server.

Synced Folders

There is minimal support for synced folders. Upon vagrant up, vagrant reload, and vagrant provision, the Rackspace provider will use rsync (if available) to uni-directionally sync the folder to the remote machine over SSH.

This is good enough for all built-in Vagrant provisioners (shell, chef, and puppet) to work!

Development

To work on the vagrant-rackspace plugin, clone this repository out, and use Bundler to get the dependencies:

$ bundle

Once you have the dependencies, verify the unit tests pass with rake:

$ bundle exec rake

If those pass, you're ready to start developing the plugin. You can test the plugin without installing it into your Vagrant environment by just creating a Vagrantfile in the top level of this directory (it is gitignored) that uses it, and uses bundler to execute Vagrant:

$ bundle exec vagrant up --provider=rackspace