Build your own CentOS base box for Vagrant

Disclaimer

This is work in progress.

Goodies

• No interaction required - installs from custom built iso image with kickstart file
• Customize time zone, locale, keyboard layout via simple configuration file
• Pick mirror, enable or disble EPEL and IUS repositories via configuration file
• Also supports installs via proxy. Reason? I have an awesome Raspberry Pi proxy server in the corner that caches rpm / deb / similar package for quick VM provisioning
• Select base pacakge set via configuration file

Issues

• Script is bit optimistic. So in case of any issues it might not be very informative

Requirements

• iso tools (mkisofs)
• 7zip (extracting iso)
• VirtualBox
• Vagrant (well why are you here?)

Running

1. Download CentOS 6.5 (might work on bit lower versions, haven't tried) and suitable VirtualBox guest extensions iso
2. Put both iso files to ./iso
3. Take a peek at settings.conf file
4. ./vagrant-centos.sh
5. Get a coffee, this will take a while. No interaction should be required (it's a kickstart install) unless there's an error
6. This should produce CentOS-6.5-x86_64-*.box file

Adding and using the box

To use it locally (assuming your project has config.vm.box = "centos65" in Vagrantfile):

vagrant add ./CentOS-6.5-x86_64-33cdcaa.box --name centos65 --force
cd ../your/project
vagrant destroy
vagrant up

This project also has a sample Vagrantfile for test-driving newly built images, so you can simply run:

vagrant add ./CentOS-6.5-x86_64-33cdcaa.box --name centos65 --force
vagrant destroy
vagrant up
vagrant ssh # to look around what's in the box

(note that "33cdcaa" part is unique to build so it will be something different)

Credits

Forked from and inspired by github.com/astrostl/vagrant-centos.