Example project showing how to run Vagrant on TravisCI using VirtualBox

See a working example here: /~https://github.com/jonashackt/vagrant-travisci-libvrt (I didn't get this setup with VirtualBox here to work, BUT the libvirt + KVM variant works like a charm!)

I´d really want to test bigger Infrastructure-as-Code projects like /~https://github.com/jonashackt/kubernetes-the-ansible-way and therefore need Vagrant running on a CI system (I don´t want to setup or host the CI system myself).

And no, Docker-in-Docker won´t suffice here!

Well until today, I really thought that there is no way to do it with TravisCI - just have a look into /~https://github.com/jonashackt/vagrant-ansible-on-appveyor (and this so thread).

But then I came upon these GitHub issues in my beloved Molecule project: /~https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule-vagrant/issues/2#issuecomment-585616279 & especially ansible-community/molecule-vagrant#8 (comment), which confused me right away because it says:

I give a try and so SUDDENLY found that Travis CI now coming with vmx from /prof/cpuinfo therefore both libvirt + KVM or VirtualBox now works...

That would be awesome, since it would enable the following workflow (which would be even simpler then his libvirt + KVM alternative, which I also needed to check out (it's working!): /~https://github.com/jonashackt/vagrant-travisci-libvrt)

First we need to configure the usual Travis .travis.yml for our project:

dist: bionic
language: python

install:
# Install VirtualBox
- sudo wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.4/virtualbox-6.1_6.1.4-136177~Ubuntu~bionic_amd64.deb
- sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-6.1_6.1.4-136177~Ubuntu~bionic_amd64.deb

# How did the VirtualBox installation go?
- VBoxManage --version

# Download Vagrant & Install Vagrant package
- sudo wget -nv https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/2.2.7/vagrant_2.2.7_x86_64.deb
- sudo dpkg -i vagrant_2.2.7_x86_64.deb

# Vagrant correctly installed?
- vagrant --version

You may experience some strange errors like The home directory you specified is not accessible:

$ vagrant up --provider=libvirt

Vagrant failed to initialize at a very early stage:

The home directory you specified is not accessible. The home

directory that Vagrant uses must be both readable and writable.

You specified: /home/travis/.vagrant.d

The command "vagrant up --provider=libvirt" exited with 1.

or Permission denied @ rb_sysopen - /home/travis/.vagrant.d/data/machine-index/index.lock (Errno::EACCES):

$ vagrant up --provider=libvirt

/opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/machine_index.rb:321:in `initialize': Permission denied @ rb_sysopen - /home/travis/.vagrant.d/data/machine-index/index.lock (Errno::EACCES)

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/machine_index.rb:321:in `open'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/machine_index.rb:321:in `with_index_lock'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/machine_index.rb:52:in `initialize'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:723:in `new'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:723:in `machine_index'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:206:in `block in action_runner'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/action/runner.rb:34:in `run'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:525:in `hook'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:774:in `unload'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/bin/vagrant:185:in `ensure in <main>'

	from /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/2.2.7/gems/vagrant-2.2.7/bin/vagrant:185:in `<main>'

The command "vagrant up --provider=libvirt" exited with 1.

The simplest solution here is to always use sudo prefixing our vagrant commands (although this stackoverflow answer tells us not to do so).

Now we should be able to add a vagrant up to the script section to our .travis.yml:

script:
- sudo vagrant up
- sudo vagrant ssh -c "echo 'hello world!'"

To speed up our future builds, we should try to cache the big Vagrant boxes throughout our builds. The Travis docs state, that we only need to add the following to our .travis.yml:

cache:
  directories:
  - /home/travis/.vagrant.d/boxes

Don't simple use .vagrant.d/boxes here, since Vagrant will place it's boxes inside /home/travis/.vagrant.d/boxes - and not inside $TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR/.vagrant.d/boxes which expands to /home/travis/build/jonashackt/vagrant-travisci/.vagrant.d/boxes.