grull-vagrant

Vagrantfile and Chef recipes for setting up ROS and GRULL Verdino ROS packages in a Vagrant virtual machine.

About Vagrant and Chef

Vagrant is a tool to create and configure reproducible and portable development environments using virtual machines. These are specified through Vagrantfiles, in a similar manner as make uses Makefiles.

The created virtual machines must be provisioned with all the software that we need. So here is where we use Chef, a configuration management tool written in Ruby.

Chef is a tool used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining company's servers, so the same recipes can be used to automatically provision and configure real machines, no only virtual machines used in development.

Requirements

Mainly, you need Vagrant and some additional plugins:

• Virtualbox (our Vagrantfile has only been tested with this VM provider)
• Vagrant >= 1.5
• Vagrant-librarian-chef
• Vagrant-omnibus (optional, if we are to use a Vagrant box with Chef pre-installed. That is not the case with the default box in our Vagrantfile)

Vagrant-librarin-chef and vagrant-omnibus plugins could be easily installed from Vagrant running:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-librarian-chef

from command line.

Software provisioned

By default, the next lines in the Vagrantfile will install and configure Ubuntu Desktop and ROS:

    chef.add_recipe "apt"
    ...
    chef.add_recipe "ubuntu-desktop"
    chef.add_recipe "vim-default-editor"
    # install ROS packages
    chef.add_recipe "ros"

If you want a ROS development environment with Kdevelop and a workspace initilized at /vagrant/ROS/isaatc-ULL, we have to uncomment the next line to add the role devel:

    chef.add_role "devel"

Finally, if you want a full GRULL Verdino ROS development environment, with all Verdino ROS packages downloaded to the workspace, you have to add the recipe grull-verdino:

    chef.add_recipe "grull-verdino"

The rosinstall file used will be:

• .rosinstall, if only the recipe grull-verdino was added.
• devel.rosinstall, if both the recipe grull-verdino and the role devel were added.

but you can override that behavior adding:

    "grull-verdino" => {
      "rosinstall_path" => ".rosinstall"
    }

to chef.json in the Vagrantfile.

Downloads from private repositories on Github

The recipe grull-verdino use SSH to download GRULL Verdino packages from Github. Because provisioning is a non-interactive task, you must have configured the access to Github using SSH key passphrases.

The SSH agent forwarding is enabled in the Vagrantfile

    config.ssh.forward_agent = true

so you only have to add your key to the SSH agent

$ ssh-add

before build a new virtual machine.

Build a virtual machine

To create the Vagrant virtual machine, just run:

$ vagrant up 

from the directory of this repository.

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) 2014, Jesús Torres <jmtorres@ull.es>. Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file.