Making Custom Boxes in Vagrant through libvirt

This is a demo to explain how to make custom boxes in vagrant that use the libvirt provider Recording for posterity, where I will ultimately forget The following guides were used to make this demo:

• Stackoverflow - how to create custom vagrant box from libvirt/kvm instance?
• PopOS 20.10 Guest OS support? for guest detection
  • This was a specific hack needed for the image I'm building here, but may come in handy for other images

This is done on Pop!_OS 20.10 which is based on Ubuntu 20.10

General Process

This guide presumes you've already followed general procedure for setting up a box.

Lets say you're at the spot where your libvirt VM is ready to packaging. Follow ./boxit.sh. The steps include:

1. Copy your box over from /var/lib/libvirt/images to box.img. It must be in the qcow2 format
2. Create a metadata.json and Vagrantfile
3. tar the following files:

• box.img
• Vagrantfile
• metadata.json

4. That should be it. Load into vagrant with vagrant box add --name custom custom_box.box
5. Upload to https://app.vagrantup.com

Notes

This is following the older box guide where they were just tar archives https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/boxes/format

You can also use:

• vagrant repackage to get a .box files e.g. vagrant box repackage pop_os_2110 libvirt 1.1.0
• vagrant cloud provider upload to upload to vagrant cloud e.g. vagrant cloud provider upload kentbrockman/pop_os_2110 libvirt 1.1.0 package.box