Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1704.01)

Wednesday, 3, May 2017 Laurențiu Păncescu announcement 8 Comments

We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.9 and CentOS Linux 7.3.1611 for x86_64, featuring updated packages to 30 April 2017 and the following changes:

Known Issues

  1. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are not preinstalled; if you need them for shared folders, please install the vagrant-vbguest plugin and add the following line to your Vagrantfile:
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "virtualbox"

    . Please note that there is a bug in VirtualBox 5.1.20 that prevents vagrant-vbguest from working.
    We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible. You can also use the vagrant-sshfs plugin, which, unlike NFS, works on all operating systems.

  2. Since the Guest Additions are missing, our images are preconfigured to use rsync for synced folders. Windows users can either use SMB for synced folders, or disable the sync directory by adding the line
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true

    to their Vagrantfile, to prevent errors on "vagrant up".

  3. Vagrant 1.8.5 is unable to create new CentOS Linux boxes due to Vagrant bug #7610
  4. Vagrant 1.8.7 is unable to download or update boxes due to Vagrant bug #7969.
  5. Vagrant 1.9.1 broke private networking, see Vagrant bug #8166
  6. Vagrant 1.9.3 doesn't work with SMB sync due to Vagrant bug #8404
  7. The vagrant-libvirt plugin is only compatible with Vagrant 1.5 to 1.8
  8. Installing open-vm-tools is not enough for enabling shared folders with Vagrant’s VMware provider. Please follow the detailed instructions in https://github.com/mvermaes/centos-vmware-tools (updated for this release).

Recommended Setup on the Host

Our automatic testing is running on a CentOS Linux 7 host, using Vagrant 1.9.3 with vagrant-libvirt and VirtualBox 5.1.20 (without the Guest Additions) as providers. We strongly recommend using the libvirt provider when stability is required.

We also performed additional manual testing with Vagrant 1.9.4 on OS X 10.11.6, with VirtualBox 5.1.20.

Downloads

The official images can be downloaded from Hashicorp’s Atlas. We provide images for libvirt-kvm, VirtualBox and VMware.

If you never used our images before:

vagrant box add centos/6 # for CentOS Linux 6, or...
vagrant box add centos/7 # for CentOS Linux 7

Existing users can upgrade their images:

vagrant box update --box centos/6
vagrant box update --box centos/7

Verifying the integrity of the images

The SHA256 checksums of the images are signed with the CentOS 7 Official Signing Key. First, download and verify the checksum file:

$ curl http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/sha256sum.txt.asc -o sha256sum.txt.asc
$ gpg --verify sha256sum.txt.asc

If the check passed, you can use the corresponding checksum when downloading the image with Vagrant:

$ vagrant box add --checksum-type sha256 --checksum f8cd95ce24fd9f615dd38bbf8b6c285a916a4cac1d98ada4ab16d6626468032b --provider libvirt --box-version 1704.01 centos/7

Unfortunately, this is not possible with vagrant box update.

Feedback

If you encounter any unexpected issues with the Vagrant images, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list, or via IRC, in #centos on Freenode.

Ackowledgements

We would like to thank Fabian Arrotin and Thomas Oulevey for their work on the build infrastructure.

We would also like to thank the following people (listed alphabetically):

8 thoughts on "Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1704.01)"

  1. Pavel says:

    v1704.01 box still not appear at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/centos/

    1. The automated process for updating the Atlas metadata failed again, so it would need to be done manually. Unfortunately, everyone with the necessary access rights was at the Red Hat Summit in Boston - this should be fixed in the following days. Sorry about that.

  2. Loïc Lavoie says:

    If I were you, I would remove the line config.vm.synced_folder “.”, “/vagrant”, type: “virtualbox” from your box configuration file.

    A vagrant shouldn't set in a hidden way those kind of configuration. For instance, on windows with VirtualBox, the whole thing refuse to start.

    I normally recommand to developer to control their folder they want attached to their vagrant box.

    The hidden line in the vagrantfile of the box actually cause issue often at our company (everytime a new employees gets in, we have to go remove that line from the downloaded box)

    1. We use type: "rsync", not type: "virtualbox", because we don't include the VirtualBox Guest Additions in our images. But you're in principle right, rsync doesn't work on Windows either (recent versions of Vagrant try to speed up ssh access by using a control connection, which not even Cygwin openssh supports). The fact that I don't even have access to a Windows machine for testing probably isn't helping with such issues.

      My recommendation is to leave our Vagrantfile as it is and override the shared folder setting in your own Vagrantfile, which you can distribute in your organization (or even better, commit it in your source control system - anything is better than editing a file on each workstation, every month). This is already suggested under Known Issues in the announcement, the first item.

      The only thing I could possibly do is disable sharing the current folder by default, but that would break something that works for Linux and macOS users, so it's not really an option. Due to limitations on the Windows side, there's no single setting that would work on all host OSes.

  3. Tom Shen says:

    Where can I find the build script, I want to build custom image based on your scripts. I know packer.

    1. We are using Image Factory (not Packer) but you can probably reuse our kickstarts - https://github.com/CentOS/sig-cloud-instance-build/tree/master/vagrant

  4. Stanislav says:

    Why there are included libs from mariadb and config files? (it is not installed)

    1. We don't install these explicitly, so I assume some package in the @core group has them as a dependency.

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