Vagrant box index

Overview

Vagrant-box-index is a simple single fie CGI script that creates a list of Vagrant boxes hosted on a web server. It is intended to help maintain a private Vagrant box repository e.g. within your company.

The script walks through a directory structure under web server document root and looks for Vagrant metadata *.json files. These files are parsed and the information is rendered into a table, making it convenient to discover boxes.

Vagrant box metadata format makes it possible to maintain the boxes under version control. Running vagrant up on a project will check if the box is up-to-date by comparing locally cached metadata to the metadata on the web server. Vagrant will notify if the box can be updated.

Installation

To install vagrant-box-index under Apache on Ubuntu, execute the following commands:

cp vagrant-box-index /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
a2enmod cgi
service apache2 restart

Next, create a directory structure for your boxes, upload them and create *.json files for each one, and finally point your browser to http://somewhere.com/cgi-bin/vagrant-box-index.

Example repository

This is an imaginary example of a private repository. Following directory structure is created:

/var/www/html/vagrant/base/rhel-6.json
/var/www/html/vagrant/base/rhel-6.6.box
/var/www/html/vagrant/base/sles-11.json
/var/www/html/vagrant/base/sles-11sp3.box
/var/www/html/vagrant/proj-bar/test-appliance.json
/var/www/html/vagrant/proj-bar/test-appliance.box
/var/www/html/vagrant/proj-foo/rhel-dev.json
/var/www/html/vagrant/proj-foo/rhel-dev-3.box

As an example, the contents of rhel-dev.json is:

{
  "name": "proj-foo/rhel-dev",
  "description": "Baseline for foo-2.3: rhel-6.6, db-5.1, some-other-comp-2.0-alpha1",
  "versions": [{
    "version": "3",
      "providers": [{
        "name": "virtualbox",
        "url": "http://somewhere.com/vagrant/proj-foo/rhel-dev-3.box"
    }]
  }]
}

An user finds appropriate box by browsing the index and then clicks "download". A popup is shown with a command to fetch the box, for example:

vagrant box add --name "proj-foo/rhel-dev" http://somewhere.com/vagrant/proj-foo/rhel-dev.json

The following screenshot shows the index page of the example repository: