Vagrant Brightbox Provider

This is a Vagrant 1.2+ plugin that adds a Brightbox provider to Vagrant, allowing Vagrant to control and provision servers in the Brightbox Cloud.

Note: This plugin requires Vagrant 1.2+,

Features

• Boot Brightbox Cloud servers.
• SSH into the servers.
• Provision the servers with any built-in Vagrant provisioner.
• Minimal synced folder support via rsync.
• Define region-specific configurations so Vagrant can manage servers in multiple regions.

Usage

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

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

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

Quick Start

After installing the plugin (instructions above), select the Brightbox Cloud image you want to use and note the id. You can find these using the Brightbox CLI or the Cloud GUI in the normal way, or you can view the Vagrant image page.

Then add your chosen box to your vagrant installation using the config.vm.box tag from your Vagrantfile, e.g.

$ vagrant box add precise32 http://docs.brightbox.com/vagrant/img-mvunm.box

If you have your ~/.fog setup to access Brightbox then you can now bring up your configuration on Brightbox Cloud with:

$ vagrant up --provider=brightbox

Generic Setup

If you don't want to be adding new box files for every type of image on Brightbox Cloud you can shift the configuration into the Vagrantfile by using the dummy.box Vagrant box file which has no preconfigured defaults.

First add the dummy box to your vagrant installation.

$ vagrant box add dummy http://docs.brightbox.com/vagrant/dummy.box

Then make a Vagrantfile that looks like the following, filling in your information where necessary along with your choice of image id

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

  config.vm.provider :brightbox do |brightbox, override|
    brightbox.client_id = "YOUR API CLIENT ID"
    brightbox.secret = "YOUR API SECRET"

    brightbox.image_id = "img-q6gc8"

    override.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "PATH TO YOUR PRIVATE KEY"
  end
end

Finally run vagrant up --provider=brightbox to build your setup on Brightbox Cloud.

This will start an Ubuntu 12.04 server in the gb1 region within your account. And assuming your SSH information was filled in properly within your Vagrantfile, SSH and provisioning will work as well.

Instead of having to add your client credentials to each Vagrantfile we can put them in the Fog configuration file. Create a new file at ~/.fog and add the following:

:default:
  :brightbox_client_id: "your_api_client_id"
  :brightbox_secret: "your_secret"

Box Format

Every provider in Vagrant must introduce a custom box format. This provider introduces brightbox 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 the required metadata.json file along with a Vagrantfile that does default settings for the provider-specific configuration for this provider.

Box Format Dowloadable Images

You can view the list of current Vagrant box files on the Brightbox documentation site.

Configuration

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

• client_id - The api access key for accessing Brightbox in the form 'cli-xxxxx'
• secret - The api secret access code for accessing Brightbox
• image_id - The image id to boot, in the form 'img-xxxxx'
• zone - The zone within the region to launch the server. If nil, it will use the default for this account.
• server_type - The type of server, such as "nano"
• region - The region to start the server in, such as "gb1"
• security_groups - An array of security groups for the server.
• server_build_timeout - The number of seconds to wait for the instance to become ready on Brightbox Cloud. Defaults to 120 seconds.

If you are the collaborator on a number of accounts you can specify which one you want by setting the following options:

• username - User id in the form 'usr-xxxxx'
• password - The password for the user id
• account - Create servers in the context of this account - in the form 'acc-xxxxx'

These can be set like typical provider-specific configuration:

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

  config.vm.provider :brightbox do |brightbox|
    brightbox.client_id = "cli-fooxx"
    brightbox.secret = "barfoobarfoobar"
  end
end

In addition to the above top-level configs, you can use the region_config method to specify region-specific overrides within your Vagrantfile. Note that the top-level region config must always be specified to choose which region you want to actually use, however. This looks like this:

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

  config.vm.provider :brightbox do |brightbox|
    brightbox.client_id = "foo"
    brightbox.secret = "bar"
    brightbox.region = "gb1"

    # Simply region config
    brightbox.region_config "gb1", :image_id => "img-mvunm"

    # More comprehensive region config
    brightbox.region_config "gb1" do |region|
      region.image_id = "img-mvunm"
    end
  end
end

The region-specific configurations will override the top-level configurations when that region is used. They otherwise inherit the top-level configurations, as you would probably expect.

Networks

By default each brightbox is created and mapped to a cloud ip so that you can access it over the public network.

However this can exhaust your allocation of cloud ips if you have several servers. Therefore a couple of networking options are supported.

  # Switch off cloud ip mapping and access servers over the IPv4 private
  # network - useful if you are running Vagrant from another cloud server.
  config.vm.network :private_network

  # Switch off cloud ip mapping and access servers over IPv6.
  config.vm.network :public_network, ipv6: true

Synced Folders

There is minimal support for synced folders. Upon vagrant up, vagrant reload, and vagrant provision, the Brightbox 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!

Other Examples

User data

You can specify user data for the server being booted.

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

  config.vm.provider "brightbox" do |brightbox|
    # Option 1: a single string
    brightbox.user_data = "#!/bin/bash\necho 'got user data' > /tmp/user_data.log\necho"

    # Option 2: use a file
    brightbox.user_data = File.read("user_data.txt")
  end
end

Development

To work on the vagrant-brightbox 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:

Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-brightbox"

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  #Config here
end

and then use bundler to execute Vagrant:

$ bundle exec vagrant up --provider=brightbox