On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:12 AM, Rainer M Krug <Rainer@krugs.de> wrote:

> Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > You might want to look at packer as well, which can build virtual
> machines
> > from an ISO, without any user intaraction. I successfully used it to
> build
> > VMs with Linux, OSX and Windows. It can also create vagrant boxes. You
> can
> > specify provisioners, e.g. to install R, or a set of R packages, etc. It
> is
> > under heavy development, by the same team as vagrant.
>
> I think I am getting lost in these - I looked ad Docker, and it looks
> promising, but I actually didn't even manage to sh into the running
> container. Is there somewhere an howto on how one can use these in R, to
> the purpose discussed in this thread? If not, I really think this would
> be needed. It is extremely difficult for me to translate what I want to
> do into the deployment / management / development scenarios discussed in
> the blogs I have found.
>

I haven't tried Docker, so I cannot say anything about that. The purpose of
vagrant and packer is slightly different, but there seems to be some
overlap.

Packer helps you building a virtual machine from an ISO, automatically,
without any human interaction. That's pretty much it. The result can be a
VirtualBox, VMWare, etc. virtual machine, or even a vagrant box. I used it
to build Ubuntu, OSX and Windows boxes, it works great if you have a
working configuration. If you need to tweak a config to install additional
software, etc. then it requires some experimenting and patience, because
debugging is not that great.

Vagrant manages disposable virtual machines. I.e. it takes a vagrant box,
which is essentially a VM and some extra configuration info, provisions it,
which usually means installing software or setting up a development
environment, and then manages it, so that you can ssh to it, or do whatever
you want with it.

There are a number of boxes available, so if you want a minimal VM with
Ubuntu32, it takes one command to create it from a public box, another one
starting it, and a third one to ssh to it. It is literally a couple of
minutes, downloading the box takes longest. If you have the box, then it is
even quicker.

You can use packer and vagrant together. Packer creates the vagrant box,
sets up a very minimal environment. Then you can use vagrant with this box.

In my opinion it is somewhat cumbersome to use this for everyday work,
although good virtualization software definitely helps.

Gabor

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