I installed VirtualBox on a Mac with an ubuntu 18.04 image. I then installed TLJH on it, pretty much as described in the instructions for installing TLJH on your own server. I was just going to experiment with it as a part of contributing to the TLJH project.
Other than doing this because you don’t have ready access to “your own ubuntu server” or don’t want to mess with trying the cloud options, is there any useful reason to do this? I can’t imagine actually setting it up as a functional server for some small group.
Would it be useful enough to the jupyter community to add instructions for it to the TLJH documentation?
I find having things like vagrant scripts handy that show how to build particular machines and that allow me to quickly spin then up a handy thing to have around. Similarly, Dockerfiles and docker-compose.yml scripts. I imagine Ansible recipes etc are useful to others.
If nothing else, automation scripts provide a crib for what’s needed in a build and what order to do things in order to get something built?
I found myself wanting to do this to have a throw away environment when debugging something while on the road with only my not-linux laptop.
I’d be happy with a list of “these five things will trip you up” or “don’t be confused when X doesn’t work, you have to do Y instead” as it is for debugging stuff once in a while. A small scruffy shell script would do.
Ok. I will plan to add this to the contributing section.
Does anybody know how to script the installation of VirtualBox? So far, I have just used the normal GUI install of things on Mac.
Presumably, some sort of curl could achieve a download. There are videos and write-ups on the normal GUI install. But it would be nice if I could make it simpler as suggested by @betatim.
I am considering creating two Ubuntu VMs. One for development and one for testing the install from a github fork. I just reviewed some of the contributing docs that I had not yet read.
Myself, I get virtualbox via brew cask, but I think it would be reasonable for the instructions to start with “install virtualbox” and point to vbox’s own install instructions. Some baselines we don’t typically cover, like setting up homebrew or python themselves.