Vagrant, Ansible and VirtualBox on WSL

I’ve finally succedded in installing and deploying three CentOS virtual boxes using Vagrant and Ansible from within WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and behind a proxy!

Here I will highlight the main stumbling parts and the commands and/or environment variable to run and/or set in order to overcome one hurdle after the other in getting thigs running smoothly.

Warning: This is not an howto or a tutorial. If you tinkering with Vagrant and Ansible, I assume you know how to install and setup the whole environment…

Requirements:

• For WSL to work, make sure the VT support is enabled in your BIOS
• Vagrant: latest
• Vagrant plugins:
  • vagrant-proxyconf needed for running behind proxy
  • virtualbox_WSL2 needed for running under WSL
  • vagrant-vbguest automatically installs the host’s VirtualBox Guest Additions
• Ansible: latest
• Virtualbox: latest

Ansible Environment:

Multi-Machine Vagrant Environments: This Vagrantfile will create 3 Centos VM’s to simulate Ansible control machine and 2 target hosts.

• host1
• host2
• ansible-host

WSL Environment Setup

Bash environment:

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export http_proxy=http://<your_proxy_server>:<port>
export https_proxy=https://<your_proxy_server>:<port>

VAGRANT Environment Setup

VirtualBox settings needed for Vagrant

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export VBOX_USER_HOME="/mnt/c/Users/<username>/.VirtualBox/"
export machinefolder="/mnt/c/Users/<username>/.VirtualBox/"
export VAGRANT_WSL_ENABLE_WINDOWS_ACCESS="1"
export VAGRANT_HOME="~/.vagrant.d/"
export PATH="$PATH:/mnt/c/Program Files/Oracle/VirtualBox" 
export VAGRANT_LOG=debug
set SSL_CERT_FILE=C:\My\App\Tools\HashiCorp\Vagrant\embedded\gems\gems\excon-0.99.0\data\cacert.pem

Plugin Installation

Install (some plugins might need to be installed as user, not root to work):

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$ vagrant plugin install --plugin-clean-sources --plugin-source https://rubygems.org virtualbox_WSL2
$ vagrant plugin install --plugin-clean-sources --plugin-source https://rubygems.org vagrant-vbguest
  - or might be necessary: $ vagrant plugin install --provider virtualbox --insecure vagrant-vbguest
$ vagrant plugin install --plugin-clean-sources --plugin-source https://rubygems.org vagrant-proxyconf

git setup

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git config --global http.sslverify false

Install requirements

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ansible-galaxy install --ignore-certs  -r requirements.yml

Files included:

• ansible.cfg
• inventory
• bootstrap-node.sh
• ansible-install.yaml
• playbook.yaml
• inventory.yaml

Connecting the dots:

Before you run vagrant up, make sure that you updated the Vagrantfile to your desired configuration. Specifically use the box that are available from https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/.

Once you are done:

• vagrant up Wait a few minutes to finish the build. Once done. You can try to ssh to your ansible-host vm. You can verify this by using “vagrant status”

• vagrant ssh ansible-host once you are login to your ansible-host vm, you can now verify if the other vm are reachable.

Full code is available here: https://github.com/xserty/ansible-labs, but don’t forget to setup the environment!

Example code was taken from https://github.com/mikecali/ansible-labs-101 under GNU General Public License v3.0.