Setup Development Environment with Vagrant on Google Compute Engine

We usually use Vagrant to provision and manage VirtualBox virtual machines or VMs. And Vagrant only ships with VirtualBox support by default. But Vagrant can do much more. VirtualBox is just one of providers, additional providers can be added via the Vagrant plugin system. Here, we are going to use Google Compute Engine as the provider and setup a disposable development environment.

Basic steps involve:

  1. Install Vagrant
  2. Install vagrant-google plugin
  3. Add SSH keys to metadata server
  4. Add Vagrant box
  5. Add a Vagrantfile and override the defaults from the box
  6. Provision the machine

First, install Vagrant (exampled by Debian systems such as Ubuntu):

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$ file=/tmp/vagrant.deb version=1.7.4 && \
  curl -sSL https://dl.bintray.com/mitchellh/vagrant/vagrant_${version}_x86_64.deb > ${file} && \
  sudo dpkg -i ${file} && \
  rm ${file} && \
  vagrant version

Install dependencies for building Debian packages, which are needed for the plugin:

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$ sudo apt-get install -y build-essential

Install vagrant-google plugin:

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$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-google
Installing the 'vagrant-google' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-google (0.2.1)'!

In order to SSH into the VM, we need to add public key to the instance which will be provisioned. In Google Compute Engine, this is done via metadata server at the project level.

Add the username to prefix the SSH key, so the Compute Engine will pick it up and create the corresponding user:

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$ echo -n 'chao:' > /tmp/id_rsa.pub
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> /tmp/id_rsa.pub

Now the concatenated one will have the username:

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chao:ssh-rsa AAAAB3... chao@ubuntu

Setting up SSH keys at the project level:

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$ gcloud compute project-info add-metadata --metadata-from-file \
  sshKeys=/tmp/id_rsa.pub

Google Cloud SDK or gcloud command should be installed already. Now it’s time to configure the machine to be provisioned.

The plugin provides a Vagrant box, which is a package format for Vagrant environments. It is not necessary to create a new box, we can just override the defaults by the Vagrantfile. So add the provider-specific box:

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$ vagrant box add gce https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-google/raw/master/google.box

Make sure the box is added:

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$ vagrant box list

Add a Vagrantfile and override the defaults: