Why I’m building custom Vagrant boxes
TL;DR: I’ve built custom Vagrant boxes for Debian 13 and Rocky Linux 10 using Packer. Grab them from the registry or take my configs to build them yourself.
When HashiCorp relicensed its free software to the non-free BSL in 2023, the two projects that received significant community-backed forks under the existing MPL terms were Terraform (OpenTofu) and Vault (OpenBao), unsurprisingly given their weight in maintaining production environments across the industry. That left less consequential HashiCorp software, like Vagrant, without the momentum to keep it free, which I’ve used for many years to design, test, and understand systems infrastructure.
Despite this, nearly three years later, you can still install the free version of Vagrant on Debian because a maintainer continues to patch 2.3.7 to make it work (HashiCorp’s non-free version is on 2.4.9 at the time of writing). Vagrant is just a convenience wrapper that automates the lifecycle of transient test virtual machines, so the urgency to find another solution has been low, especially as long as Debian continues to package it.
Following the Debian 13 release, Debian Vagrant box updates stalled for a while
after the
maintainer decided to stop publishing images
due to Vagrant’s non-free upstream status and breaking changes to HashiCorp’s
image hosting platform. That led me to start building
custom Debian 13 boxes
with Packer.1 One clear benefit of a custom box is baking in the NFS
client for host file sharing, so it’s present from first boot, rather than
installed during the first vagrant up, as you’d have to on the current
official Debian image.
Lately, I’ve also been looking to run Rocky Linux boxes and ran into yet another issue with official distro Vagrant boxes: the Rocky Linux registry links have been broken for months, making all official Rocky Linux boxes entirely unavailable. So now I’m building and publishing both Debian 13 and Rocky Linux 10 Vagrant boxes for the libvirt provider.
Thankfully, Debian appears to have resumed updating its boxes more recently, which is great, and likely the path most people should take for Debian. Still, a deeper understanding of building custom boxes, greater control over updates, and the additional flexibility of baking the NFS client have led me to continue rolling my own. I publish them mostly for my own convenience, but since they’re public, feel free to use them or build them yourself if they’re useful.
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There’s some irony in concern for a free Vagrant and then building images with Packer, as it’s the same BSL relicense. But it’s the obvious tool, in the same ecosystem, and made for exactly this. And like Vagrant, it’s low stakes enough. ↩