Box.py is a simple automation tool meant to run Ubuntu cloud image on top of VirtualBox.

What it does is simply download official cloud image for Ubuntu server, set up VM, tweak it up and do the initial pre-configuration using generated config drive.

I've wrote this little tool just to not click myself to death using web browser for downloading cloud images, and going through VirtualBox GUI (or figuring out weird named options for vboxmanage ;P)

Perhaps other distros would be supported in the future.

Requirements

• Python 3.x - pyyaml

• Virtualbox (obviously)

• mkisofs or genisoimage command for generating iso image

• wget command for fetching images

• sha256sum command for checksum check

• qemu-img from qemu-utils package command for converting between images formats

How to run it

First, make sure you fulfill the requirements, than you can issue:

$ alias boxpy='python /path/to/box.py'

or simply link it somewhere in the path:

$ ln -s /path/to/box.py ~/bin/boxpy
$ chmod +x ~/bin/boxpy

and now you can issue some command. There are four command for simple managing VMs, maybe some other will be available in the future. Who knows.

For your convenience there is a bash completion for each command, so you can use it ad-hoc, or place on your .bashrc or whatever:

$ source <(boxpy completion bash)

currently there are four commands available:

• list - for quickly listing all/running VMs

• destroy - that is probably obvious one

• create and rebuild

The latter two accepts several options besides required vm name. You can examine it by using --help.

What is more interesting though, is the fact, that you can pass your own cloud-init yaml file, so that VM can be provisioned in easy way.

Default user-script looks as follows:

users:
  - default
  - name: ubuntu
    ssh_authorized_keys:
      - $ssh_key
    chpasswd: { expire: False }
    gecos: ubuntu
    sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
    groups: users, admin
power_state:
  mode: poweroff
  timeout: 10
  condition: True

It is really simple, and use string.Template for exchanging token $ssh_key with default, or provided public key, so that you will be able to log in into the VM using that key. Section power_state is used internally for making sure the cloud-init finish up and the VM will be started again.

What is more interesting is the fact, that you could use whatever cloud-init accepts, and a special section, for keeping configuration, so that you don't need to provide all the option every time you boot up similar VM. For example:

packages:
  - jq
  - silversearcher-ag
  - tmux
  - vim-nox
runcmd:
  - [su, -, ubuntu, -c, "echo 'set nocompatible' > .vimrc"]
boxpy_data:
  ssh_key: vm
  cpus: 4
  memory: 4GB
  disk_size: 20GB

Contents of the user script will be merged with the default one, so expect, that user ubuntu will be there, and magically you'll be able to connect to the machine using ssh.

Providing file with this content using --cloud-config, will build a VM with 4 CPUs, 4GB of RAM, expand Ubuntu-server image to 20GB (it'll be dynamically allocated VDI image, so it will not swallow all 20 gigs of space) and pass the vm ssh key, which will be looked in ~/.ssh directory, if path to the key is not provided.

Moreover, there will be some tools installed and simple vim config initialized, just to make you an idea, what could be done with it.

License

This work is licensed under GPL-3.