Packer is a tool for virtual machine image and container management supporting creation and provisioning of multiple boxes.
This repository contains a collection of scripts to build a VirtualBox OVF image, and a Vagrant Box that contains an installation of the latest stable release of Idris and Idris2.
Originally we based the boxes off of LTS versions of Ubuntu, however we have switched to a more conservative (in size) distribution: Alpine Linux.
The idea behind this box provisioning is to provide fellow researchers with an image suitable for production of Research Artifacts suitable for evaluation. While we, as Scientists, often publish papers and code online, these artifacts are more tuned towards reproducible results and conservancy of the research as it was done at the time.
The box is intended to allow evaluators access to a working Idris compiler, and evaluate artifacts using the command line.
While we could use Docker, Packer is a Swiss Army knife of tooling that supports generation of many kinds of images.
This project was initially designed for Idris1 reproducible builds, but I have extended it to support Idris2.
Support for Idris1 is not continuing.
To build the boxes install the dependencies:
- packer
- virtualbox
- virtualbox-guest-additions-iso
and then call the Makefile in the following order:
make alpine # the base VM
make idris # the base vm with idris2Only one style of box is provided for Idris2, a conservative Alpine image.
The box can be found in the idris directory.
- The set up is around 10 minutes including building the base image.
- We have installed idris2 using
nix pkgs. Although idris2 is available from Alpine’s own repository, we include nix to allow installation of other packages not in Alpine’s own repositories.Thus when provision this box further you need to add the following to your provision script:
echo ". $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh" >> ~/.profile . .profile
| Base OS | Alpine Linux 3.16.3 |
| CPU | 64-AMD |
| Memory | 4 GB |
| Disk | 8 GB |
| Cores | 2 |
| Idris2 | 0.6.0 |
- Boxname
idris-playground- Username
idris-playground- Password
idris-playground
There are two setups provided for Idris1: a hefty Ubuntu LTS Server image; and a more conservative Alpine image.
They are provided in the idris1 directory.
- This vagrant box has been tested with vagrant.
- The Ubuntu setup will take around 40 minutes to build. The build of the time is spent downloading GHC and building Idris [fn:f9e343f29bb1fab].
- The Alpine setup is much quicker around 10-15 minutes.
| Base OS | Ubuntu Server 18.04.04 LTS | Alpine Linux 3.11.5 |
| CPU | 64-AMD | 64-AMD |
| Memory | 4 GB | 4 GB |
| Disk | 20 GB | 4 GB |
| Cores | 2 | 2 |
| GHC | 8.2.2 | n/a |
| Cabal | 2.4 | n/a |
| Idris | 1.3.2 | 1.3.2 |
- Boxname
idris-playground- Username
idris-playground- Password
idris-playground
Extra software was installed to support Idris installation.
- mg
- A lightweight emacs clone.
- tmux
- For advanced terminal usage.
- hyperfine
- For running benchmarks.
- nix
- to get packages not available in alpine’s repositories.
Use this command for obtaining logs.
PACKER_LOG=1 PACKER_LOG_PATH="packer-log.txt" packer build <image name>.jsonThe following repositories were instrumental in getting the Alpine linux box setup.
- https://github.com/ketzacoatl/packer-alpine/
- https://ketzacoatl.github.io/posts/2017-06-02-build-alpine-vagrant-box-with-packer.html
- https://github.com/rgl/alpine-vagrant
[fn:f9e343f29bb1fab] We need some binary distribution tools for Idris but sadly that is not a priority.