scripts & configs for starting up Windows VirtualBox environments with packer & vagrant
I created this project because i wanted to try some Windows 10 / Visual Studio 2015 features on my Windows 7 Machine. Also has an exercise to learn functionality of packer and vagrant. This will build a personal development environment tailored to me, but it can be customized for your needs. The source of most of this info is the packer-windows repo. I have just stripped down most of it to pertain to Windows 10 and Virtual Box
Directions are assuming a Windows host environment and using VirtualBox for virtualization. I have tried it successfully on Windows 7 and Windows 10 (Other environments are possible but I haven't personally done it.) All steps can be performed via command line, and assume you don't have any previous software installed.
- Install Chocolatey.
- Install VirtualBox, Packer, and Vagrant.
choco install VirtualBox
choco install Packer
choco install Vagrant
- Clone this repo into a directory.
- Within that directory run packer to build a vagrant .box file. This step will download the Windows 10 Eval ISO from Microsoft, install Windows, install chocolately, a few dev tools (Including Visual Studio 2015 Community). So it will take a while.
packer build windows_10.json
- This should have resulted in a .box file created meant to be used with vagrant. Next, we need to add this box to vagrant's list so it can manage it for us.
vagrant box add -name win10 windows_10_virtualbox.box
- The next step is initialize the directory to be used with vagrant.
vagrant init win10
- Now, we are all ready to boot and use the VM!
vagrant up
It SHOULD be up and running at this point. If you would like to Remote into it, you can run the following command
vagrant rdp
The username and password will be vagrant\vagrant NOTE: IF you are a Windows 10 host you may need to specify LocalAccount\vagrant
The easiest thing to customize on this is which software gets installed with the machine installation the scripts/chocolately.bat file contains all the packages that get installed by Chocolately when Packer builds the image. I am copying some config files in the Packer provisioner, which you can change and/or replace with others that would suit your needs.
I was getting some WinRM errors when running this at first, I was able to get around this by installing a plugin, so this command may need to be run before the vagrant up command if you get errors
vagrant plugin install winrm-fs