Tails can be built in a virtual machine that is managed using Vagrant. Here lies more details on how Tails uses Vagrant, its configuration, and how to create and upload the template virtual machine.

Configuration

Vagrant support files are located in the vagrant directory at the root of the amnesia.git repository.

This directory contains:

• Vagrantfile: [configuration file for Vagrant](http://vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile.html],
• provision/setup-tails-builder: idempotent provisioning script that is run inside the virtual machine upon boot,
• provision/assets/build-tails: build script to be run inside the virtual machine,
• to build the Squeeze base box:
  • definitions/squeeze/definition.rb: Veewee configuration,
  • definitions/squeeze/preseed.cfg: preseed file used by the debian-installer,
  • definitions/squeeze/postinstall.sh: script run on first boot of the base box.

We choose to use the Shell provisioner, as long as we make this script reentrant it will lower the learning curve for contributors not familiar with Puppet or Chef.

The Vagrantfile will share the .git directory of the local clone of the repository. This is done to overcome limitations of VirtualBox shared folders (namely symlink support). The build script will clone (and fetch further changes) that "bare" repository.

Creating the base box

The creation of the base box is fully automated using a tool called Veewee.

Installing the requirements

To build the base box from scratch using Veewee, you will need to get both Veewee and Vargant from Rubygems:

# gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc vagrant
# gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc veewee

Note: Unfortunately, using gem --user does not work. The basebox subcommands that is made available by Veewee never shows up in Vagrant. That needs to sorted out upstream.

Note: Installing the Veewee gem will install the Vagrant gem, even if the Debian package is installed.

Running Veewee

Running Veewee has been automated using Rake. So creating the base box is just a matter of running:

$ http_proxy="http://proxy.lan:3142" rake basebox:create_basebox

Obivously, you can drop the http_proxy part if you don't have one.

The rest should be fully automatic, and leave you with a squeeze.box file in the vagrant directory.

Update the distributed base box

The base box on Tails mirrors is expected to lie at project/vagrant/squeeze.box.

Do not forget to update the corresponding SHA256 sum in vagrant/Vagrantfile.

In details

To create the basebox from the squeeze template (in definitions directory), the command is the following:

$ vagrant basebox build squeeze

Note: It looks like the current version of the virtualbox gem is not compatible with VirtualBox 4.0.x that is in squeeze-backports. Using a hand made backport of virtualbox 4.1.12-dfsg-2 worked fine.

After issuing that command, Veewee will download the boot ISO image, drive the debian-installer using [preeseding] and run postinstall.sh that will take care of seting up the environment expected by Vagrant.

In order to support local HTTP proxy, the preseed.cfg is generated from an ERB template during the Rake task create_preseed_cfg.

Once the initial setup is done, it is worthwhile to see if the basebox fits Vagrant requirements. Veewee ships with an automated test suite:

$ vagrant basebox validate squeeze

If everything goes well, then, great, we have our basebox. Let's export it to a .box file that Vagrant can use:

$ vagrant basebox export squeeze