This is the most helpful (and friendly) monkey a lab assistant can get. And since lab assistants do all kinds of monkey business, this little guy can be of great help.
This is what our monkey does:
- build virtual machines (VMs) for lab envirtonments based on configuration files
- install operating systems inside your VM
- download, install and set up packages and programs
- do all sorts of shady things possible through a command-line shell
- set up environments and get to the innetmost secret places for crazy hacking
And all of this without touching the keyboard. Well... this or crashing and burning your computer, killing you and your friends in the process and flinging poop at strangers. Did I say it is friendly? Well... umm... it is still an experimental project.
The main tool employed by our helpful little monkey is Packer by HashiCorp, which was included in the project source.
This tool is (at the moment) entirely build from bash scripts and relies heavily on UNIX commands, thus it is rather obvious that it was built on and for Linux operating systems. On the other hand, emulation in Windows with CygWin or similar tools should be possible, though it was not tested.
Depending on the virtual machine you are targeting you need to install either
Virtual Box with Extension Pack, or
VMware Player
with VIX API.(not yet)
Provided you acquired this wonderful tool in some way or another (ideally by cloning
the master branch) and set it up somewhere you have permission to read, write and execute files, you have to
cd in the installation folder
cd /path/to/your/virtual_monkey_buider
ATTENTION the commands will work only from the program path.
Assuming that you already have a configuration file describing a virtual machine and its installed components, you have to run:
./vmb config <path/to/cfg_file>
All configuration files should be in the config folder, but there's no one to
stop you from being messy and placing them wherever. You can create your own
configuration by modifying config/config.template file.
The monkey will start working by checking the dependencies, trying to retreive
missing files and building two Packer configuration files preseed.cfg and
buildscript.json. If some step does not succeed, you will be aggresively prompted
and be faced with in-program solutions. Now don't be a lazy ass, read them!
It usually involves some clickies here and there, and manually downloading some
files.
Good, you have the configuration files for your dream virtual machine. Now you have to tell the monkey "work!", grab a coffee and enjoy the show. You do that by typing the command
./vmb build
Depending on your configuration it may take from a few minutes to a few hours. But at least the colours are pretty... and they move... You should keep an eye on what is happening on the terminal, since if something goes wrong, you will be prompted.
Voila! You now have a fully functional and set-up virtual machine with your lab
environment. That's it! That wasn't so hard, was it? The VM is in a newly created
folder starting with output_. Now you just have to import it into your virtual
machine player, and play around with it, maybe tweak to satisfy all your
pretentious demands.
Oh, and before I forget... your monkey is a bit messy, it leaves a lot of garbage behind. To clean up after her, you need to issue the command:
./vmb clean
That's it!
Of course, you can invoke a help message using
./vmb -h
./vmb <command> -h
If you want to build your own configurations, add provisioner scripts or even make your own bundles you need to know a little bit about the project's innards.
To build a documentation of the Monkey's current structure, components and useful tips, write
./vmb doc
If you find this little monkey useful and have ideas for further extending it, you are more than welcome to contribute with code or at least open new issues.
Currently I have the following extensions in mind, and I hope to see them implemented sometimes:
- add support for native VMware builds
- add support for cloud VMs
- clean up the code
- translate the automation scripts to something OS-independent, like python.
This project is licensed under MIT license.
The VM build engine is Packer by HashiCorp, included in this project and licensed under the MIT license.