If you’ve been following this blog (which hasn’t been updated in a loooong time), chances are that you are likely to be a user of one of the Vagrant plugins I’ve released on the past. What you might not know is that I haven’t been using Vagrant so frequently over the last year or so and haven’t had much time to work on them to put up to the plans I originally had in mind. Read more

Last week I cut the first release of notify-send-http, a tool for triggering notify-send across the network using HTTP. Useful for forwarding notifications from local VMs / Containers to your own computer. It even supports notification icons! Tested on Ubuntu 14.04 only Why? Because I do all of my dev work on virtualized environments and I use guard quite a lot to keep my Ruby tests running when files get changed. Read more

2013 was the year I went 100% on Vagrant, went crazy releasing plugins (10 to be more specific) and ended becoming a Vagrant core commiter back in June. To give you an idea, this is what I’ve released over the year: vagrant-notify - Released at the end of 2012, but “matured” by beginning of 2013 vagrant-boxen (deprecated) - February 17th vagrant-lxc - March 12th vagrant-cachier - May 22nd vagrant-pristine (deprecated) - July 11th bindler - (deprecated) Public release on July 15th as Vundler and later renamed to Bindler vagrant-global-status (deprecated) - August 8th vocker (deprecated) - August 14th ventriloquist (deprecated) - September 10th docker-provider (deprecated) - November 5th Before you think I’m going nuts, I have a reason behind releasing each plugin and I might blog about that someday but for the scope of this post I’ll focus on what you should expect for each one of them over 2014. Read more

There are times that you might need / want to use a specific provider for your Vagrant boxes that differs from VirtualBox or whatever provider you have set on your VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER environmental variable. For experienced Ruby users this might seem something trivial to do but since Vagrant’s community is made of people from many different programming languages background, I thought it would be nice to share this little trick I find useful when I need to make sure the VMs goes up with the right provider. Read more

I’ve been playing a lot with Docker recently and while learning more about it I came across “Another Union File System” (AUFS) + its Copy On Write (COW) capabilities and have been pretty impressed by it. In short, by using a COW + union file system Docker makes things really cheap when it comes to disk usage. The idea of COW filesystems along with a couple GitHub issues, some tweets exchanged with @rcarmo and this post on improvements made on lxc-clone was enough to trigger my interest on BTRFS and I went out to learn more about it. Read more