LibreTime Radio Automation - Using Vagrant and Virturalbox for developing LibreTime

Using Vagrant and Virturalbox for developing LibreTime

The fastest way to get LibreTime up and running in a way to hack on its source code or to test it locally.

Prerequisites: git, Vagrant, libvirt or VirturalBox

Virtual Box

You will need to install VirtualBox and may want to consider installing vagrant-vbguest to update the guest extensions to match your host system on vagrant up.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

Libvirt

Setting the libvirt provider up on (Ubuntu and Debian)[#Ubuntu and Debian] is straight forward, using the distribution provided packages. While on (Other Distributions)[#Other Distributions] it can be built from within vagrant.

If you try run a libvirt provided box after using a VirtualBox one, you will receive an error:

Error while activating network:
Call to virNetworkCreate failed: internal error: Network is already in use by interface vboxnet0.

This is fixed by stopping virtualbox and re-creating the vagrant box:

sudo systemctl stop virtualbox
vagrant destroy ubuntu-xenial
vagrant up ubuntu-xenial --provider=libvirt

Debian and Ubuntu

sudo apt install vagrant vagrant-libvirt libvirt-daemon-system vagrant-mutate libvirt-dev
sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $USER

# Reboot

vagrant box add bento/ubuntu-16.04 --provider=virtualbox
vagrant mutate bento/ubuntu-16.04 libvirt
vagrant up ubuntu-xenial --provider=libvirt

Other Distributions

You will need to install libvirt and vagrant-mutate and then run

vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $USER

# Reboot

vagrant plugin install vagrant-mutate
vagrant box fetch bento/ubuntu-16.04
vagrant mutate bento/ubuntu-16.04 libvirt
vagrant up ubuntu-xenial --provider=libvirt

Starting LibreTime Vagrant

To get started you clone the repo and run vagrant up. The command accepts a parameter to change the default provider if you have multiple installed. This can be done by appending --provider=virtualbox or --provider=libvirt as applicable.

git clone https://github.com/libretime/libretime.git
cd libretime
vagrant up ubuntu-xenial

If everything works out, you will find LibreTime on port 8080, icecast on port 8000 and the docs on port 8888.

Once you reach the web setup GUI you can click through it using the default values. To connect to the vagrant machine you can run vagrant ssh ubuntu-xenial in the libretime directory.

Alternative OS installations

With the above instructions LibreTime is installed on Ubuntu Xenial Xerus. The Vagrant setup offers the option to choose a different operation system according to you needs.

OS	Command	Comment
Debian 10	`vagrant up debian-buster`	Install on Debian Buster.
Debian 9	`vagrant up debian-stretch`	Install on current Debian Stretch. Needs manual intervention due to Liquidsoap 1.3.3.
Ubuntu 18.04	`vagrant up ubuntu-bionic`	Install on current Ubuntu Bionic Beaver.
Ubuntu 16.04	`vagrant up ubuntu-xenial`	Install on Ubuntu Xenial Xerus.
CentOS	`vagrant up centos`	Extremely experimental install on 7.3 with native systemd support and activated SELinux. Needs manual intervention due to Liquidsoap 1.3.3.

Troubleshooting

If anything fails during the initial provisioning step you can try running vagrant provision to re-run the installer.

If you only want to re-run parts of the installer, use --provision-with $step. The supported steps are prepare, install, install-mkdocs and start-mkdocs.