vagrant up requirements not documented

[damphyr]

Berkshelf is used but a standard Vagrant installation (e.g. brew install vagrant on OS X) does not have the plugin installed. This results in

14:08 $ vagrant up
Vagrantfile:9:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>': the required plugin 'vagrant-berkshelf' is not installed! (RuntimeError)
    from cookbook-elk-stack/Vagrantfile:7:in `each'
    from cookbook-elk-stack/Vagrantfile:7:in `block in <top (required)>'

[damphyr]

I am discovering the missing plugins one by one and cursing you all the way... :P

[damphyr]

Also, berkshelf fails spectacularly on my OS X installation with convoluted git related errors, which is a big bummer.

[SvenBayer]

Could this be partly solved with the following snippet?

Required Vagrant plugins for this script. (Not sure if comma separation is correct)

required_plugins = %w( vagrant-omnibus, vagrant-berkshelf )

Install required Vagrant plugins.

required_plugins.each do |plugin| system "vagrant plugin install #{plugin}" unless Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin end

[damphyr]

Probably :)

[tknerr]

@SvenBayer there is a whole thread on this issue where Vagrant is missing something like a Gemfile to automatically install missing plugins, with all kinds of more or less sophisticated workarounds ;-) https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/1874

It's really sad that this mechanism is still not in yet :-(

@damphyr haha, rememeber our vagrant-plugin-bundler nightly hack session from 2 years ago at the camp?! :-)))

On the plugin dependencies: I wanted to save on the additional code for installing missing plugins and intended to "document" the plugin requirements here in the Vagrantfile. Also I wouldn't want a vagrant up to install new plugins as a side effect, because plugins are global and would possibly break my other vagrant projects.

My way of dealing with that in projects is to distribute a "DevPack" like bills-kitchen for windows users, or a VM like linus-kitchen for linux users. Then I only refer to "needs (bills|linus)-kitchen version X.Y.Z)" in the README (which is clearly missing here -- sorry for that...). Also, there is no steves-kitchen yet Vassilis ;-)

[tknerr]

Finally, I was already tempted to remove the Vagrantfile for exactly the problems you are having now. You don't even need it as you can do the very same things using test-kitchen too, it's just a slighly different syntax:

• https://github.com/CatCalZone/catcalzone-infrastructure/wiki#test-kitchen
• https://github.com/tknerr/zdays2015-demo-repo/tree/master/chef-tdd-test-kitchen

It still uses the vagrant driver, but does not need any additional plugins (test-kitchen handles the installation of the omnibus chef client and also runs berkshelf on its own)

Last but not least: in the context of the new Policyfiles feature berkshelf will eventually get replaced by a pure ruby based dependency solver (= no need to compile libgecode on bundle install which takes forever), but not sure when this is going to happen.

It would be super interesting for us (topic team) to take a look at the Policyfiles, but right now it seems not mainstream enough to me yet to replace berkshelf (e.g. there is no vagrant-policyfiles plugin yet, not sure if it works in a chef-serverless workflow, etc...)