Creating your own base box for vagrant is a great thing to do, you get to undestand exactly what is on that box and to choose exactly what base OS you use.

After all one of the big draws of vagrant is keeping your dev environment close to what production looks like - and for that you need to know what is in the base box.

When I first started using vagrant I wrote a post How to build a Centos 6 base Box for vagrant whcih details the manual steps needed. At the time I was busy learning puppet, vagrant and related tools - veewee was just one tool too many and a manual build seemed the best way to get my head around what a base box was.

While the base box isn’t something I have needed to repeat much, it is beneficial to update the base image from time to time and here veewee is brilliant. It also makes shareing the reponnsbibility for the base box within a team easy.

Here’s what I did

I’ve published a project on github https://github.com/practicalweb/vagrant-rpmbuild

The project contains a Vagrant config file, and Puppet manifests that together with an appropriate basebox will create a VM setup to build RPMS and host them on a Custom Yum repository

To run this

Update : Creating new Vagrant base boxes with Veewee

I originally went down a manual route as I wanted to understand the process, and since I’m familiar with manual installs this was the easiest path for me at the time.

You’re probably better off using veewee or packer