Arch-Vagrant

This project builds on Arch-Ansible to integrate it with Vagrant, taking the official box archlinux/archlinux and provisioning it. Due to some choices made by the base box maintainers, some aspects are different with respect to an installation performed using Arch-Ansible alone. For example, the base box uses GRUB while many partitioning flows opt for Syslinux. However, if you need to rapidly spin up an Arch Linux box for testing, these differences are likely to be of no concern.

Both VirtualBox and QEMU (via libvirt) are supported and the official base box provides support for both.

The resulting installed system will be non-portable, meaning that proxy settings and custom repositories will persist.

If working behind an HTTP(S) proxy, the vagrant-proxyconf plugin is required. Conversely, vagrant-vbguest is disabled, because Arch ships with its own guest additions packages.

The following variables can be tweaked in the Vagrantfile:

• enable_audio can be set to a supported (and system-specific) audio system recognized by VirtualBox, such as pulse. If so, the VM will have audio support, otherwise audio will be unavailable. This setting has no effect for libvirt machines, which always have audio support;
• http_proxy will be passed to both vagrant-proxyconf and Arch-Ansible. Set it when wotking behind an HTTP proxy;
• default_memory is the amount of RAM the VM will get, in MiB;
• default_video_ram is the amount of video RAM the VM will get, in MiB;
• default_cpus is the number of virtual CPUs the VM will get. By default, it is set to half the logical processor of the host, so if you have a 12-thread CPU it will be set to 6.

Please note that RAM settings are usually adequate for booting and provisioning the VM and to allow the final system to start the GUI. You may need to increase them to open many apps or if you customize the playbook to install a heavier DE.

When audio is enabled (which means always for libvirt machines) the emulated audio is AC97 and there is currently no way to change that but manually editing the Vagrantfile.

libvirt machines use the virtio GPU and have the SPICE and QEMU agent channels enabled by default.

After optional tweaking, just spin your VM up with:

vagrant up --provider=$PROVIDER

$PROVIDER is simply a placeholder and should be set appropriately to select either virtualbox or libvirt. The latter should be chosen to run VMs backed by QEMU.

After provisioning is complete, restart the VM. This is a required step to load a new kernel in case one was installed, as well as to hand over network management from systemd-networkd to NetworkManager.

vagrant reload