Quick Start with Vagrant

Vagrant HOST Steps

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

Installing Vagrant and Downloading Armbian

First, you’ll need to install Vagrant on your host box. Then you have to choose if you want to run Virtualbox or Libvirt.

Virtualbox

Install Virtualbox, then 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

Libvirt

Installing libvirt is a little bit more complex as you have to install an hypervisor too (like KVM/Qemu but others are available). Discussing about which one choosing and how to install it is out of scope. Once you have libvirt and an hypervisor installed, you’ll need vagrant-libvirt. Finally, you need to tell vagrant to use libvirt and not default to Virtualbox.

export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt

Common steps

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 generic/ubuntu2204

# 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

Shut down, clean up

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

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

Moved here.