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Infinite Interns

Vagrant VM boxes for data driven journalism projects.

This repository contains the Infinite Interns VM development. You may be more interested in the sample project skel for using Infinite Interns.

Preliminaries: VirtualBox and Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool to "create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments." Vagrant itself is a virtual instance creation and startup tool on top of Oracle VirtualBox which takes care of the virtualisation.

Download and install the Open Source Edition of VirtualBox from virtualbox.

Then download and install Vagrant from vagrant. The Linux packages install the vagrant executable at /opt/vagrant/bin and you will need to add this to your path.

Testing an Intern

There is a Rakefile with useful targets for creating and generating Vagrant VMs for each Intern. To create an instance of a desired Vagrant VM and run the provisioning scripts, for instance to create the sage Intern:

rake sage

This will build and install any dependant boxes for the target, create it in Vagrant and run any necessary Puppet provisioning. This step may take some time. When it is complete, you can ssh onto the instance using:

vagrant ssh sage

When finished, you should destroy the VM:

vagrant destroy -f sage

Building Interns

To build all the Interns, use:

rake

This will create and export each Intern in turn to box files in target and will take a considerable time to run.

To build an individual Intern, use rake with the target output box file, e.g.:

rake target/sage.box

The Rakefile is setup to depend on the Puppet manifests for deciding when to rebuild box files.

There is a rake target for running puppet-lint on the infinite_interns modules. This requires puppet-lint to be installed. The dev VM includes this and can be used if puppet-lint is difficult to install on your host machine. Run puppet-lint using:

rake lint

The generated interns can be removed and any construction torn down using:

rake clean

Using an Exported Intern

A number of Interns have been packaged and exported to Dropbox already. See examples for Vagrantfiles that can be used to fetch and create instances of each Intern without the full building process.

Available Interns

  • python: A VM for developing Python software. Contains Python, IPython, IPython Notebook, pip and virtualenv. Includes Python libraries for scraping and parsing like BeautifulSoup, lxml, requests, messytables, kales and scraperwiki.

  • ruby: A VM for developing Ruby software. Contains Ruby, Rake, irb and rubygems support.

  • java: A VM for developing Java software. Contains OpenJDK 6.

  • nodejs: A VM for developing software with Node.js.

  • pandas: An extension of the python VM with additional specialised Python libraries for data. Includes NumPy, SciPy, Mathplotlib, Pandas, ScikitLearn, tables and PandaSQL.

  • pylucene: An extension of the python VM with Lucene and the PyLucene wrappers.

  • refine: A VM containing Refine.

  • r: A VM containing R, RStudio and an installation of R packages useful in data manipulation, regression analysis and graphing. Also includes tex, pandoc and everything in the dataviz VM.

  • bugs: A VM installation of OpenBugs and JAGS for Bayesian MCMC.

  • sage: A VM containing the Sage mathematics environment incorporating R, Octave, GNUPlot and other systems.

  • octave: A VM containing Octave and GNUPlot.

  • vowpalwabbit: A VM containing the VowpalWabbit online regression tool.

  • datavis: A VM containing graphics software like GraphViz and GNUPlot for data visualisation.

  • saiku: A VM containing the Saiku OLAP analysis webapp and backing installations of Tomcat, InfiniDB.

  • mysql: A VM containing a MySQL installation.

  • infinidb: A VM containing an InfiniDB columnar MySQL installation.

  • elasticsearch: A VM containing an ElasticSearch installation.

  • mongodb: A VM containing a MongoDB installation.

  • neo4j: A VM containing a Neo4J installation.

  • postgresql: A VM containing a PostgreSQL installation.

  • nginx: A VM with NGINX for webserving.

  • tomcat: A VM installation of the Tomcat application server.

  • hadoop: A BigTop based Hadoop 2 VM in pseudo-distributed mode.

  • phantomjs: A VM containing an installation of PhantomJS.

  • slimerjs: A VM containing an installation of SlimerJS.

  • casperjs: A VM containing an installation of CasperJS as well as PhantomJS and SlimerJS.

  • ocr: A VM containing tesseract for optical character recognition.

  • dev: A VM for Infinite Intern development tasks. Useful if the host machine is being difficult. Includes everything from the ruby Intern together with git, librarian-puppet and puppet-lint.

  • boxgrinder: A VM containing Boxgrinder for building VMs.

Vagrant Commmands

  • vagrant suspend: Disable the virtual instance. The allocated disc space for the instance is retained but the instance will not be available. The running state at suspend time is saved for resumption.
  • vagrant resume: Wake up a previously suspended virtual instance.
  • vagrant halt: Turn off the virtual instance. Calling vagrant up after this is the equivalent of a reboot.
  • vagrant up --no-provision: Bring up the virtual instance without doing the provisioning step. Useful if the provisioning step is destructive.
  • vagrant destroy: Hose your virtual instance, reclaiming the allocated disc space.
  • vagrant provision: Rerun puppet or chef provisioning on the virtual instance.

Vagrant SSH X Forwarding

X applications on VMs can be displayed on the host machine by specifying a Vagrant SSH connection with X11 forwarding in the Vagrantfile:

config.ssh.forward_x11 = true

On the host machine, add an xhost for the Vagrant VM:

xhost +10.0.0.2

Then X applications started from the VM should display on the host machine.

Vagrant Troubleshooting

To see more verbose output on any vagrant command, add a VAGRANT_LOG environment variable setting, e.g.:

VAGRANT_LOG=INFO /opt/vagrant/bin/vagrant up

Further help troubleshooting can be obtained by editing your Vagrantfile and enabling the config.vm.boot_mode = :gui setting. This will pop up a VirtualBox GUI window on boot.

There have been some issues getting 64bit instances to start. The error is apparent in GUI boot:

VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration has been enabled, but is not
operational. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and
will not be able to boot.

Some BIOS setting changes can help. The changes are described at http://dba-star.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-to-enable-vtx-and-vtd-on-hp-compaq.html but briefly:

  1. Restart your host machine.
  2. Press F10 for BIOS settings at the boot splash.
  3. Edit Security -> System Security
  4. Enable VT-x and VT-d settings.
  5. Save and exit.