BoxGrinder

New Year - new release! I decided to push out a bugfix release for BoxGrinder Build because of one nasty bug: BGBUILD-124 which prevented from mounting more that one partition in libguestfs. I removed also ... [More] unused RPM database recreation code which is not necessary after we dropped Fedora 11 and 12 support in 0.7.0. This update is immediately available for download from our repositoryas well as from Fedora updates-testing repo. Bug [BGBUILD-124] - Guestfs fails while mounting multiple partitions with '_' prefix Task [BGBUILD-122] - Remove kernel recreation for Fedora EC2 images [BGBUILD-123] - Remove RPM database recreation code [BGBUILD-125] - Create kickstart files in RPM-based OS plugin in a temporary directory ...... [Less]

With the upcoming 0.8.0 BoxGrinder Build version we have decided to change a bit the way of configuring and using it. The changes affect both the configuration files and the command line interface. Read on to learn ... [More] more! Configuration file While we had a global configuration file earlier but it wasn't really exposed because the functionally was far away from worth mentioning. But now it's changed! As you may expect, the configuration file uses YAML format. There are some interesting parameters you can set. Let's take a look at them. By default BoxGrinder will look in $HOME/.boxgrinder/config file for configuration data. But you can easily override it using BG_CONFIG_FILE environment variable: export BG_CONFIG_FILE=/home/boxgrinder/boxgrinder_config_file ...... [Less]

This is the second article about the upcoming BoxGrinder Build 0.8.0 features. Previously I highlighted new configuration and CLI. Today I'll show how easy it is to use BoxGrinder from a ruby script. ... [More] Background Currently if you want to use BoxGrinder Build in a script, you are forced to execute a shell process where you specify command line arguments. Although this is a simple solution - it isn't very clean. Take a look at this trivial example: #!/bin/env ruby puts "Building appliance XYZ..." system "boxgrinder build xyz.appl -p vmware -d local" puts "Done!" There are a couple of disadvantages to this solution: Logging - catching STDOUT and STDERR logs from a process and redirecting them to our logger...... [Less]

As promised - I've just uploaded my slides from BoxGrinder talk I presented at FUDCon 2011 in Tempe. [Update 31.01.2011] It seems slideshare messed a bit code listings on some slides. ... [More] Pleasedownload the original PDF for a better quality. Enjoy! ...... [Less]

Thanks to Max and Robyn (and of course my boss!) I was able to attend this year's FUDCon in Tempe, AZ. I submitted a talk proposal about BoxGrinder. This was my first time at a BarCamp-like ... [More] conference. I was surprised how the topic selection works. Every submitted talk (and there was about 70 talks at least!) was introduced by speaker in the main room in about 15 sec. This time must suffice to attract the people to attend the session. I like it this way – community chooses tracks they want listen to. My BoxGrinder talk was accepted. Not sure if it was because of the topic itself or stickers that arrived one day before...... [Less]

Update: With BoxGrinder 0.9.x the invocation has been changed, please refer to current usage instructions. I'm really happy to announce immediate availability of BoxGrinder Build 0.8.0! This is the next major release ... [More] with great new features. Let's dive into some highlights! Consolidated configuration file and command line interface improvements Both things had quite high priority in my todo list. Both are drastically improving the usability of BoxGrinder. From now you don't need to have multiple configuration files - everything is located in one file and you can override configuration from command line. Configuration file like this: plugins: vmware: type: personal thin_disk: true ...and configuration specified like this: boxgrinder build...... [Less]

Here it is! After a week full of importing, editing, polishing - it's finally here. Let me introduce the new BoxGrinder website! It's now available under boxgrinder.org address. New blog address We ... [More] also moved our blog from cloudpress.org to boxgrinder.org/blog. The reason for that is that cloudpress was really a BoxGrinder blog. Now we have everything in one place. Don't forget to update your feed reader! Every comment is appreciated! ...... [Less]

Update: With BoxGrinder 0.9.x the invocation has been changed, please refer to current usage instructions. I'm happy to announce BoxGrinder Build 0.8.1. This is a bugfix release. Please refer to the Release Notes below for a ... [More] full list of bugfixes. This release is immediately available from BoxGrinder stable repo and will be available shortly in Fedora Rawhide. Some future ideas (your input needed!) Moving all plugins into boxgrinder-build gem? In this release I fixed some gem dependency issues. Currently we have 11 plugins for BoxGrinder Build. Keeping the gemspec and RPM spec files up to date with the proper versions of all of the dependencies is difficult. I'm therefore...... [Less]

Yeah! I'm really happy to announce the next major release of BoxGrinder Build: 0.9.0! This release includes many bug fixes and most importantly - some requested features. See release notes for a detailed list of issues. ... [More] What's new? Packaging In the previous version we packaged every BoxGrinder plugin in its own Gem (and then RPM). This wasn't great because the amount of time to maintain versions and dependencies between plugins was too big. Instead of adding new great features I was involved in fixing packaging bugs. But not anymore! Now we only ship 2 gems: boxgrinder-core boxgrinder-build See the quick start for updated installation instructions. Fedora 15 support You...... [Less]

You know what's good? Support for a new Cloud. You know what's better? Support for many new Clouds! I'm excited to share with you that with the upcoming 0.9.1 release BoxGrinder is going to support the following new Clouds: ... [More] ElasticHosts - US, UK SKALI Cloud - Malaysia Open Hosting - US Serverlove - UK It was possible because all the above listed Clouds share the same API for disk and server management, perfect! The API itself is really straightforward and makes the interaction with services easy. At this point I would like to thank all the Cloud providers for their help on testing this, especially the ElasticHosts guys which...... [Less]