PhotoPipe VM

A Debian 8.6, Vagrant virtual machine for running PhotoPipe, an automated photometry pipeline.

Works with macOS and Linux.

Installation

1) Download VirtualBox installer for your operating system.

Note 1: version 5.1.10 or higher is required due to a bug affecting urllib. Note 2: download and install also the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack.

2) Download Vagrant installer for your operating system.

Note: v1.8.6 of Vagrant is required due to a bug affecting v1.8.7.

3) Setup NFS (Linux only)

Because of an old issue with VirtualBox's Shared Folders and mmap, as well as the poor performance of Shared Folders, folders from your host OS will be shared with the VM using Network File System (NFS).

To install NFS on your Linux system do:

$ sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap

This comes pre-installed on Mac OS X 10.5+ (Leopard and higher).

4) Download and launch the VM

$ mkdir photopipe-vm && cd photopipe-vm
$ git clone [email protected]:maxperry/photometrypipeline-vm.git
$ chmod +x start.sh
$ sudo ./start.sh

This will download the VM box from VagrantCloud (~1GB), setup the VM with Vagrant (will prompt for your host machine root password), and finally SSH into the virtual machine. When required for the login password, type vagrant. Root password for the VM is also vagrant.

Usage

Run all the commands below from the photopipe-vm folder where the VM is located.

Stopping the VM

$ cd photopipe-vm
$ vagrant suspend

Resuming the VM

$ cd photopipe-vm
$ ./start.sh

Removing the VM

$ cd photopipe-vm
$ vagrant destroy

See Vagrant Getting Started docs for other commands.

Configuration

The virtual machine is configured with 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM. These and other parameters can be edited from the Vagrantfile.

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
	vb.memory = "2048"
	vb.cpus = "2"
end

See here for a full description.