Vagrantfile and Chef recipes for setting up Qt Creator in a Vagrant virtual machine.

Vagrant is a tool to create and configure reproducible and portable development environments using virtual machines. These are specified through Vagrantfiles, in a similar manner as make uses Makefiles.

The created virtual machines must be provisioned with all the software that we need. So here is where we use Chef, a configuration management tool written in Ruby.

Chef is a tool used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining company's servers, so the same recipes can be used to automatically provision and configure real machines, no only virtual machines used in development.

Mainly, you need Vagrant and some additional plugins:

• Virtualbox (our Vagrantfile has only been tested with this VM provider)
• Vagrant >= 1.5
• Vagrant-librarian-chef
• Vagrant-omnibus (optional, if we are to use a Vagrant box with Chef pre-installed. That isn't the case with the default box in our Vagrantfile)

Vagrant-librarin-chef and vagrant-omnibus plugins could be easily installed from Vagrant running:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-librarian-chef

from command line.

To create the Vagrant virtual machine, just run:

$ vagrant up 

from the directory of this repository, where is the Vagrantfile.

If the previous command is successful, remember you can manage the new virtual machine using the following Vagrant commands:

• vagrant halt, to stop the virtual machine.
• vagrant destroy, to remove the virtual machine.
• vagrant ssh, to enter the virtual machine.

By default, the next lines in the Vagrantfile will install and configure Ubuntu Desktop and download the Qt Creator installer:

    chef.add_recipe "apt"
    ...
    chef.add_recipe "ubuntu-desktop"
    chef.add_recipe "vim-default-editor"
    ...
    chef.add_recipe "qtproject"

Currently, Qt Creator isn't automatically installed because it doesn't support unattended installations. But it is downloaded to the desktop, so we can easily run the installer.

The SSH agent forwarding is enabled in the Vagrantfile

    config.ssh.forward_agent = true

so you only have to add your key to the SSH agent

$ ssh-add

before build a new virtual machine with vagrant up.

Copyright (c) 2014-2015, Jesús Torres <[email protected]>. Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file.