Create Vagrant base box manually from existing one

Vagrant Boxes are prepackaged development environments that are provided by Vagrant. In most cases, this is usually just a stripped and naked operating system such as Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS. Boxes exist with the intention to be provisioned with additional features like Apache server or PostgreSQL database
with Puppet, shell script or anyone of provision tools.

The main documentation about Vagrant configuration can be found here

This post will describe how to create your own prepackaged Vagrant Box manually from an existing box from https://atlas.hashicorp.com. In my opinion, it’s the quickest and easiest way to save time for provisioning default box with Vagrant. We need to provision machine manually once and then use it in the future, of course we can lost flexibility of usual Vagrant approach when I need always run provision process for clean box. This way you’ll be able to reuse prepared box over and over and even share it.

For example I want to prepare my own box from existing Ubuntu box, many of boxes could be found on https://atlas.hashicorp.com site. I think for my purposes I get hashicorp/precise64 , so I init it:

vagrant init hashicorp/precise64

then I need to run it:

vagrant up

after couple minutes I can enter machine via ssh and start to install things that I think I want to have in my own box:

vagrant ssh

then do some commands to install mc, postgresql, etc :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apache2

sudo apt-get install -y mc
sudo apt-get install -y htop
sudo apt-get install -y postgresql-9.1 postgresql-server-dev-9.1 libpq-dev python-dev python-setuptools
sudo apt-get clean

All packages that I want already installed, now I can package that instance to my own box:

vagrant package --output mynew.box
vagrant box add mynewbox mynew.box
vagrant destroy
vagrant init mynewbox

after that I can run my own box:

vagrant up

I can also upload that box up to atlas storage kamyanskiy/ubuntu14_psql93 For that there I need to configure provider, version, upload image and then release it.