[[!meta title="Replacing Vagrant?"]]

[[!toc levels=2]]

**Main ticket**: [[!tails_ticket 7526]]

Goals of our Vagrant thing
==========================

1. Make it easy to new contributors to build a Tails ISO.
2. Improve consistency between our various ways of building Tails ISOs
   (Tails developers currently use at least 3 different build setups,
   and our auto-builder yet another one).
3. Our "easy build" instructions must work at least on:
   - Debian stable + backports
   - Debian testing
4. Ideally, our "easy build" instructions should also work at least on:
   - latest Ubuntu LTS
   - latest Ubuntu non-LTS

What we have
============

* A Vagrant setup that works on a Wheezy host, and presumably on a sid
  one too. No idea about Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and upcoming 14.10, let
  alone other distros or non-Linux OS.

* Our Vagrant setup has many problems: [[!tails_ticket 7527]].

* What our Vagrant thing does:
  - downloads and checks a build basebox as needed
  - creates and configures a build VM as needed
  - fires up a build VM as needed
  - makes the Git tree available in the build VM (with VirtualBox
    shared folders)
  - run the build scripts inside the build VM, taking into account
    various options (passed as environment variables) to accomodate
    local needs
  - retrieve the build artifacts from the build VM onto the host system

* Vagrant hasn't been actively maintained in Debian for a while.
  It is part of Jessie, but that was by a very short margin. OTOH it
  looks like its maintainer now cares much more about it.

* VirtualBox vs. QEMU/KVM:
  - One can't run both VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM on the same system.
  - Vagrant use VirtualBox by default.
  - Some of us use VirtualBox, some of us use QEMU/KVM.
  - Our infrastructure (e.g. auto-builder) uses QEMU/KVM.
  - It seems easier to convert VirtualBox users among us to QEMU/KVM,
    than the contrary, thanks to the larger feature set (e.g.
    USB removable devices emulation). GNOME Boxes may make it less
    painful for some.
  - There's a vagrant-libvirt plugin available, not in Debian yet, see
    the corresponding blueprint for packaging and backporting
    challenges. That's irrelevant, though, if the vagrant package
    itself is not very well maintained in Debian.
  - There's a libvirt driver for VirtualBox too.

* Vagrant's upstream provides a .deb, but no proper source package
  (they're using FPM). There's no strong cryptographic way to
  authenticate this package after downloading it. We don't want to
  rely on that package, nor to advertise it, for security reasons, and
  also due to our policy to do things with/in Debian.

* Docker is seeing a lot of traction lately. It might be a better bet
  than Vagrant on the long-term.

What others use
===============

* Ubuntu cloud images are built with vmbuilder, which works basically
  at the same level as live-build. It might be useful to create and
  maintain a builder basebox, but it doesn't provide the same glue as
  Vagrant for downloading, managing, booting and file sharing.
* Same for other building cloud images for other operating systems,
  apparently:
  <http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/content/ch_creating_images_automatically.html>
* [Vortex](https://github.com/websecurify/node-vortex/) is similar
  to Vagrant. Only supports VirtualBox (and the Amazon cloud) as
  of 20141130.

Plan
====

* Short-term: fix the Vagrant situation for the most important
  usecases ([[!tails_ticket 7527]])
* Mid-term: fix the situation for real, starting with evaluating
  `vagrant-lxc` (in Stretch, [[!tails_ticket 10232]]) and `vagrant-libvirt` (see
  [[blueprint|blueprint/vagrant-libvirt]]). If none of those is good
  enough, then let's give another look to Docker ([[!tails_ticket
  7530]], [[blueprint/evaluate_Docker]]).
