Boxing our custom CentOS 7 for Vagrant to manage a virtual machine environment, Part 3

CentOS 7 configuration 

• You can start your configuration by setting SELinux to permissive mode (prints warnings instead of enforcing the security policy)

# sed -i -e 's/^SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=permissive/' /etc/selinux/config

• Allow the vagrant user to use sudo without needing to provide a password

# echo "vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

• Create a .ssh folder, for your vagrant user, so that ssh keys and informations are stored there

# mkdir -m 0700 -p /home/vagrant/.ssh

• You can set up the ssh public/private key provided by Vagrant, with the following command

# curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub >> /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys

NOTE: Confirm you received data, otherwise you’ll have problems when running vagrant up

Figure 1: Retrieving keys

• Change permissions on authorized_keys file to be more restrictive

# chmod 600 /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys

• Change ownership of the .ssh folder to your vagrant user and group

# chown -R vagrant:vagrant /home/vagrant/.ssh

• Change the following settings for GRUB to make the boot faster
  • Don’t display any menu and boot immediately

# sed -i -e 's/GRUB_TIMEOUT=5/GRUB_TIMEOUT=0/' /etc/default/grub

• • Set the default menu entry to 0 instead of saved (saved may not be available in all situations)

# sed -i -e 's/GRUB_DEFAULT=saved/GRUB_DEFAULT=0/' /etc/default/grub

• Rebuild grub configuration file

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

• Perform a system update using

# yum -y update

• Clear the tmp folder

# rm -rf /tmp/* 

• Clean the system with

# yum clean all

• Clean up history

# history -c

• And you can finally shutdown the machine

# shutdown -h now

Box your VM

• To be able to use your newly created VM with vagrant, you need to box it. To do so, open a terminal and go to a folder of your choice. The package will be created there. Execute the following command (specify –output if you want to provide a different name for the box)

vagrant package --base [VM name you just created] --output [name for your box]

Ex.: vagrant package --base example_centos7 --output example_centos7.box

• If you go to the selected folder, you will see the box you just created

• If you list the boxes available for vagrant, you won’t see the one you just created

# vagrant box list

• You need to add the box to the list

# vagrant box add [path to the box file] --name [name you want to have for your vagrant box] 

Ex.: vagrant box add c:\workspace\example-centos7\example_centos7.box --name example_centos7-box

• If you list the boxes available now, you should see your box on the list

That’s it

…and everything is set. You now have your own CentOS 7 box, that you can use to distribute and add additional configurations/tools using Vagrant.

Sources: 

https://medium.com/@gevorggalstyan/creating-own-custom-vagrant-box-ae7e94043a4e

https://softwaretester.info/create-vagrant-box-centos-7-virtualbox/

https://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/setup-centos-7-vagrant-base-box-virtualbox/