Well Holy Hannah, I received my first Twitter DM over a blog post I've written. I'm officially a pro now 🧐
Run with sudo and no arguments, the macinbox tool will create and add a Vagrant VMware box named 'macinbox' which boots fullscreen to the desktop of the 'vagrant' user: $ sudo macinbox. Please be patient, as this may take a while. (On a 2.5 GHz MacBookPro11,5 it takes about 11 minutes, 30 seconds.). Vagrant package -base VirtualBoxVMName -output /path/to/output/windows.box -vagrantfile /path/to/initial/Vagrantfile Replace VirtualBoxVMName with the name of your base box as it appears in the VirtualBox UI. Replace /path/to/output/windows.box with the path where you would like the Vagrant base box file to be saved. MacOS Vagrant Box. A clean (no other software installed or configured) macOS box. No changes made to the box beyond those performed by macinbox. Use only in accordance with the Apple SLAs: These boxes are built for use with VirtualBox. Defaults: 4 GB of memory; 2 CPUs; 64 GB dynamically-allocated disk; APFS (Apple File System).
Add the Vagrant box you want to use. We'll use Ubuntu 12.04 for the following example. $ vagrant box add precise64 You can find more boxes at Vagrant Cloud Now create a test directory and cd into the test directory. How to install vagrant on mac os catalina #Esperamos contar con tu apoyo #Suscribete en nuestro canal #Siguenos en In.
The DM was from a user that was having some issues with the instructions I provided on a post I wrote in 2015 for S&W here about how to run the then-current release of macOS inside a Vagrant box.
So I thought, what the heck that blog post is 2 yrs old and in computer time that's pratically middle aged. And Trump's been president for essentially a full year now and let's not even talk about what that's done to the flow of time.
Source: Space.com article, here. Article credits NASA/JPL-CalTech.
tldr - it's worth revisiting, Me Said To Me
Laptop Specs
- 15' 2015 Macbook Pro
- 16 GB of RAM
- 2.8 GHz CPU
- 1 TB SSD
- macOS High Sierra, 10.13.2
Downloads
- macOS High Sierra from the App Store
- Image is approximately 5.2 GB
- latest Vagrant from Hashicorp
- As of this post the latest release is 2.0.1
- Image is approximately 70 MB
- latest release of VirtualBox from Oracle
- As of this post the latest release is 5.2.2
- Image is approximately 93 MB
- Homebrew - a package installer for macOS. Not required but recommended / encouraged.
- iTerm - an alternative to the Terminal app included in macOS. Again, not required but recommended. For the rest of this post 'terminal' can be used interchangeably for iTerm or Terminal, whichever you chose.
Protip: you can install Vagrant and VirtualBox using Homebrew:
- Open terminal
- Install Homebrew (
brew) using the command provided on the link above - Install Vagrant
brew cask install vagrant - Install VirtualBox
brew cask install virtualbox
The main benefit of using a package installer like this is that your packages, like Vagrant and VirtualBox, can now be kept updated with brew update rather than manually downloading / updating package installers from various websites.
For the VirtualBox install you will be prompted to open System Preferences → Security & Privacy at some point. If you don't do this 'fast enough' (by the system's pre-programmed determination) then the install may error out. Fear not! It caches the install like so:
So if the install halts for this reason, or because Connection reset by peer (typically that means slow internet connection), or for any other reason, then you can just hit the up arrow to re-run the last command and hit Enter. Just make sure you fix whatever it asks you to first 😉
What this will essentially look like in terminal:
Documented on my frequently used assets page.
The Gritty Bits
Ok, so now that we have All the Things we need to do ... quite a few steps, actually.
Creating your ISO File
First, when you download High Sierra, or any other macOS release to date, you are downloading the file as a DMG, which is a proprietary Apple disk image format. In order to run macOS in VirtualBox, we'll need to convert the DMG file to a more general format such as an ISO. To do this, we're going to start by converting the installer DMG that we downloaded from the App Store into an image of the full OS, store that in a DMG, and then use a utility called PowerISO to do the final conversion.
If that just read like a paragraph of panic, don't worry! We're going through it step by step.
The output will look like this:
Troubleshooting
What to do if you see the following error:
This most likely means that you've already mounted the InstallESD image. Go into Disk Utility and unmount it:
This likely happened when the High Sierra download completed and immediately opened the installer.
Create Macos Vagrant Box
Using your VHD file with VirualBox
Open VirtualBox:
Click New:
Vagrant Osx Box
Choose a name, Type is 'Mac OS X', and Version is 'macOS 10.13 High Sierra (64-bit)'. Then click 'Continue':
The default memory is 2 GB, I recommend upping it to 4 GB though if you can:
Choose 'Create a Virtual Hard Disk File now' and 'Create':
For the curious
The image manipulations above, with arrow / blurring of text / etc., were done with the Skitch app. You only need an account to save in Evernote - account-less you can just locally save / export to whatever image file format you prefer.
Vagrant Mac Box
Quickest Vagrant Tutoral Ever