ryanhanks-wf / osx-ci-runner-builder

OS X templates for Packer and VeeWee.

OS X CI builder

The template and scripts here prepare an OS X installer media image and uses that image to create a vmware vm and a vagrant box for running CI tasks and testing task as they get ran in a CI environment.

1. Prereqs

• Get OS X Mavericks Installer .App

• VMware Fusion

• Vagrant

• Vagrant VMware Fusion plugin

• vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-fusion

• vagrant plugin license vagrant-vmware-fusion license.lic

• Packer

2. Build OS X Installer

We need to build an installer image that packer will run to create our new VM from. This installer will run through the OS X Mavericks install process and then runs some scripts on the newly created VM to provision it. sudo prepare_iso/prepare_iso.sh "/Applications/Install OS X Mavericks.app" out (~2m45s)

3. Use packer to run the installer and provision a new vm or vagrant box.

✗ cd packer
✗ packer build template.json

Add the vm to vagrant

vagrant box add osx-42 ~/src/Others/osx-vm-templates/packer/packer_vmware_vmware.box

4. Use the VM

vagrant init osx-42
vagrant up --provider vmware_fusion

Original Readme

This also configures the machine such that it can be used out of the box with Vagrant and the Hashicorp VMware Fusion provider. This requires at least Vagrant 1.3.0 and vagrant-vmware-fusion 0.8.2.

Provisioning steps that are defined in the template via items in the scripts directory:

• Vagrant-specific configuration
• VM guest tools installation
• Xcode CLI tools installation
• Chef installation via the Opscode Omnibus installer
• Puppet installation via Hashicorp's Puppet bootstrap

Usage

Run the prepare_iso.sh script with two arguments: the path to an "Install OS X.app" or the InstallESD.dmg contained within, and an output directory. Root privileges are required in order to write a new DMG with the correct file ownerships. For example, with a 10.8.4 Mountain Lion installer:

sudo prepare_iso/prepare_iso.sh "/Applications/Install OS X Mountain Lion.app" out

...should output progress information ending in something this:

-- MD5: dc93ded64396574897a5f41d6dd7066c
-- Done. Built image is located at out/OSX_InstallESD_10.8.4_12E55.dmg. Add this iso and its checksum to your template.

The path and checksum can now be added to your Packer or VeeWee template/definition file. The packer and veewee folders contain templates that can be used with the vmware builder and vmfusion providers, for the respective build systems.

The Packer template adds some additional VMX options required for OS X guests, but VeeWee has this functionality built-in. Also note that Packer's iso_url builder key accepts file paths, both absolute and relative (to the current working directory).

Automated installs on OS X

OS X's installer supports a kind of bootstrap install functionality similar to Linux and Windows, however it must be invoked using pre-existing files placed on the booted installation media. This approach is roughly equivalent to that used by Apple's System Image Utility for deploying automated OS X installations and image restoration.

The prepare_iso.sh script in this repo takes care of mounting and modifying a vanilla OS X installer downloaded from the Mac App Store. The resulting .dmg file and checksum can then be added to the Packer template or VeeWee definition. Because the preparation is done up front, no boot command sequences are required.

More details as to the modifications to the installer media are provided in the comments of the script.

Supported guest OS versions

Currently the prepare script supports Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks.

Automated GUI logins

For some kinds of automated tasks, it may be necessary to have an active GUI login session (for example, test suites requiring a GUI, or Jenkins SSH slaves expecting a window server). The Packer templates support enabling this automatically by using the autologin_vagrant_user user variable, which can be set to anything non-zero, for example:

packer build -var autologin_vagrant_user=yes template.json

This was easily made possible thanks to Per Olofsson's CreateUserPkg utility, which was used to help create the box's vagrant user in the prepare_iso script, and which also helpfully supports generating the magic kcpassword file with a particular hash format.

VirtualBox support

There is none. Oracle seems to not officially support versions of OS X guests more recent than Snow Leopard Server, ca. 2009.

Box sizes

A built box with CLI tools, Puppet and Chef is over 5GB in size. It might be advisable to remove (with care) some unwanted applications in an additional postinstall script. It should also be possible to modify the OS X installer package to install fewer components, but this is non-trivial. One can also supply a custom "choice changes XML" file to modify the installer choices in a supported way, but from my testing, this only allows removing several auxiliary packages that make up no more than 6-8% of the installed footprint (for example, multilingual voices and dictionary files).

Alternate approaches to VM provisioning

Mads Fog Albrechtslund documents a interesting method for converting unbooted .dmg images into VMDK files for use with ESXi.