Quick Start with Vagrant¶

Vagrant HOST Steps¶

The following steps are performed on the host that runs Vagrant.

Installing Vagrant and Downloading Armbian¶

Virtualbox Version¶

WARNING: We’ll be using Virtualbox as a virtualization provider for Vagrant. Virtualbox has documented issues running Xenial under heavy disk IO. Please make sure your version of Virtualbox is >= 5.1.12 where the issue, “Storage: fixed a problem with the LsiLogic SCSI controller where requests could be lost with SMP guests”, appears to have been resolved.

First, you’ll need to install Vagrant on your host box. Next, you’ll need to install a plug-in that will enable us to resize the primary storage device. Without it, the default Vagrant images are too small to build Armbian.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-disksize

Now we’ll need to install git and clone the Armbian repo. While this might seem obvious, we rely on it being there when we use Vagrant to bring up our guest-build box.

# Clone the project.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/armbian/build

# Make the Vagrant box available. This might take a while but only needs to be done once.
vagrant box add ubuntu/bionic64

# If the box gets updated by the folks at HashiCorp, we'll want to update our copy too.
# This only needs done once and a while.
vagrant box update

Armbian Directory Structure¶

Before we bring up the box, take note of the directory structure used by the Armbian build tool. When you read the Vagrantfile (which is in the build/config/templates directory) you’ll see that Vagrant will mount local output and userpatches directories. This is helpful as it enables you to easily retrieve your images from the host once built, and customize the build process.

Creating the Vagrant Guest Box Used to Build¶

Let’s bring the box up. This might take a minute or two depending on your bandwidth and hardware.

# We have to be in the same directory as the Vagrant file, which is in the build/config/templates directory.

cd build/config/templates

#  Note that you can edit the Vagrant  file to specify the number of cpus and amount of memory you want Vagrant to     use.

# And now we simply let vagrant create our box and bring it up.

vagrant up

# When the box has been installed we can get access via ssh.
# (No need for passwords, Vagrant installs the keys we'll need.)
vagrant ssh

Important note¶

It is strongly recommended to halt and restart the Vagrant box after building an image. Check this issue for details.

Vagrant GUEST Steps¶

The following steps are all run on the guest Vagrant created for us.

Once it’s finally up and you’re logged in, it works much like any of the other install methods (NOTE: again, these commands are run on the guest box).

# Let's get building!
cd armbian
sudo ./compile.sh

More Vagrant HOST Steps¶

Wrap up your vagrant box when no longer needed (log out of the guest before running these commands on the host system):

# Shutdown, but leave the box around for more building at a later time:
vagrant halt

# Trash the box and remove all the related storage devices.
vagrant destroy