When you have the need to create VM boxes that can run in multiple environments Packer is an excellent choice.

Out of the box Packer comes with support to build images for Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine, QEMU, VirtualBox, VMware, and more.

Support for more platforms is on the way, and anyone can add new platforms via plugins.

For a local development environment we can leverage the advantages of using Vagrant to run VMs and test or develop right in a clean environment without inadvertently introducing settings or configurations of our host machine.

This allows to level the conditions of the development, staging, QA and production environments.

In this way we would avoid circumstances like:

I don’t know what happened. It ran fine in my machine.

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Awhile ago I started exploring what containers were and how to wrap my head around them to do deployments.

I pointed my browser to Docker’s Mac OS X installation web page which read something like this:

Because the Docker daemon uses Linux-specific kernel features, you can’t run Docker natively in OS X. Instead, you must install the Boot2Docker application. Boot2Docker includes a VirtualBox VM, Docker itself, and the Boot2Docker management tool.

Since I already have another VM environment installed (aka VMWare Fusion) and also Vagrant, I wasn’t too keen to install VirtualBox just for the exploratory exercise.

The solution was rather simple. Use Vagrant to start a Linux Box and then Install Docker in it.

You can use the following Vagrantfile as an example.

  The Vagrantfile refers to bootstrap_docker.sh. This is a simple bash script that runs after Vagrant boots your VM and then installs Docker.  
Copy and paste the code into the Vagrantfile and bootstrap_docker.sh in a new directory then run Vagrant.

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

Once you ssh into the box test your Docker installation:

$ sudo docker run -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash

This will download the Ubuntu container and start a shell session on it.

That’s it!
Time to experiment with more containers.