Vagrant with "native" shared Directories

Purpose

Working with Vagrant on non-linux systems is painful since all "shared folder" options feel slow in some way. On linux, using vagrant-lxc as Vagrant provider, you can use native bind mounts, which are fast as they share the filesystem directly.

Docker Beta for Mac provides some improved shared filesystem, which is faster than rsync, NFS, etc.

The idea is to create a docker container, having a shared directory to the host, which then will be shared again to the Vagrant box via bind mounts (using vagrant-lxc).

Status

• the shared mount works taking advantage of Docker Betas shared filesystem and the bind mount of the nested Vagrant box, having the same filesystem shared. all contents of srv/ are shared into the docker container and similar to the nested Vagrant box.
• Vagrant box creation fails as the lxc-attach command for the network device does not directly apply. this can be fixed manually.
• the Vagrant box DNS setup is broken after boot. this can be fixed manually.

Howto

On the Host Machine

Install Docker Beta

Prepare the Container once:

make build
make create

Then start it and connect to it:

docker start vagrant_container
make ssh.docker

In the Docker Container

(where you just connected via make ssh.docker)

vagrant up

This will fail as the network config for port 22 does not apply correctly. To workaround this, you need to run this command ...

sudo /usr/bin/env lxc-attach \
    --logfile=/var/log/lxc-cbdev.log --logpriority=DEBUG \
    --name cbdev --namespaces 'NETWORK|MOUNT' -- \
        /sbin/ip -4 addr show scope global eth0  \
    && sudo netstat -ntpl

... until the port 22 appears in the list:

Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      5718/sshd
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:6022            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      7/sshd
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      5718/sshd
tcp6       0      0 :::6022                 :::*                    LISTEN      7/sshd

You could now call vagrant up again and this would finish successfully.

In the Nested Vagrant Box

Connect to this box from your host via

make ssh.vagrant

First we need to hack the Nameserver:

sudo sh -c "echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' >> /etc/resolv.conf"
sudo sh -c "echo 'nameserver 8.8.4.4' >> /etc/resolv.conf"
sudo dhclient -r eth0

then all things work smoothly :)

Issues

Find the reason why lxc-attach fails on Vagrant box creation

TODO

Override the Nameserver properly

Usually this should work: append to /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf:

interface "eth0" {
    prepend domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4;
}

then: sudo dhclient -r eth0