GECo Virtual Machine

Introduction

This is a virtual machine with all important LIGO-related software pre-installed.

I am building this because dealing with LIGO's dependencies is a hassle and a waste of time. Doing any work at remotely is a difficult proposition (unless you are sshed into a LIGO server, which is frequently impossible or undesirable), and setup is not uniform across OSes. I imagine I am not the only one who has this problem, so I hope that others might find this useful.

Using the Virtual Machine

If you just want to use the virtual machine, you can follow these instructions to get started. These instructions should work on any system.

1. Download and install the latest version of VirtualBox.
2. Download and install the latest version of Vagrant
3. Run vagrant init stefco/geco-vm to create a simple Vagrantfile for this box, or use the default Vagrantfile.
4. Run vagrant up to download and boot the virtual machine.
5. Run vagrant ssh to start using the virtual machine.

That's it. Once you are sshed into the guest machine, it is just like using ssh with any other machine. You can run exit to return to the host machine. While not using the guest machine, you can simply run vagrant to get a short list of available commands.

Using the Default Vagrant File

Download this repository's Vagrantfile to the folder you want to work in. There are some instructions within the Vagrantfile on how to customize it to suit your needs; feel free to make what changes you need before proceeding.

More information on Vagrant

You can read Vagrant's documentation on their website for more information. One of the greatest benefits of Vagrant (besides its easy, declarative command-line interface) is that it automatically shares certain files on your host machine with the guest virtual machine. More specifically, it shares files that are in the same folder as your Vagrantfile, and it puts these files in the /vagrant directory on the virtual machine.

This makes it trivially easy to work on both machines at once, either through the command line or through the gui (as long as you've placed your Vagrantfile in the directory where you are planning on working). This is especially nice in a headless environment; your vagrant ssh session will behave as if the host and guest OSes are sharing their filesystem. This is nice if, like most people, you are not interested in spending time transfering files and syncing environments.

There are many other interesting and useful features of Vagrant that make it a wonderful tool for streamlining your workflow; again, check out their website for more information.

Developing the Base Image

If you are just interested in using this tool, then the following section is not for you. If, however, you are interested in adding features to the base image (especially features that would be useful to other people), then read on.

This machine is built and deployed using a tool called Packer, made by the same people who make Vagrant. Configuration information for creating a virtual machine using Packer can be found on their website. The important idea, though, is that Packer uses a template file (in our case, geco-vm.json) to specify:

• Builders, which take an installation disk image (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit, in our case) and make a fresh installation in a new virtual machine using the providers of your choice (for us, only VirtualBox, though you can get crazy with VMWare, DigitalOcean, Amazon AWS, Docker, etc.)
• Provisioners, which handle file-copying and script running (usually runnning a dependency install script, like provision.sh, in our case); this is the part where you get to customize the box with whatever you need.
• Post-Processors, which package the resulting virtual machine image so that it can be used by Vagrant, and which automatically upload the images to Atlas (see below).

The image created will be available on HashiCorp Atlas, whence it will be trivially easily downloadable using Vagrant and will run on VirtualBox, all of which are free to use. There will be a default Vagrantfile provided with this repository to make it easy for people to get started right away.

This tutorial was invaluable in getting going quickly with Packer. I also found this helpful. And, of course, Packer's own documentation is invaluable.

Without this ssh configuration example from @ChiperSoft I would remain locked out of my own box (Thanks!).

As far as provisioning LIGO tools, I drew inspiration from DASWG's page, from scripts written by Szabi for provisioning his own Debian box, from conversations with people at the observatories, and from the gwpy .travis.yml configuration scripts, which are capable of provisioning an Ubuntu 12.04 installation on Travis CI's servers sufficiently well for gwpy to install properly (though they use source installations, which I avoid for the sake of build speed).

Notes on LIGO Data Grid

• Different data is available at different sites. See here for a breakdown of what is where.

To Do

• Get packer build working with the Ubuntu 12.04 virtualbox machine
• Get ligo tools installed
• Get this machine up on atlas
• Write a demo Vagrantfile with how-to explanations
• Install Globus/Condor/DataGrid
• Install gwpy
• Install geco_stat
• ???
• Profit