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I'm currently using Chef's Test Kitchen to test my cookbook recipes before applying the recipes to my managed node. My managed node has the operating system Ubuntu 16.04 server edition. I can see a listing of base boxes provided by the Bento project here.

I am currently using the ubuntu-16.04 platform with vagrant as my driver. On hashicorp's site, I do not see a listing for ubuntu 16.04 server. Am I correct in assuming that base boxes are provided for the desktop versions of the ubuntu operating systems, and that no base boxes are currently provided for the server editions of ubuntu?

If no base boxes for ubuntu 16.04 server are available, is it sufficient to test my recipes against an ubuntu 16.04 desktop instance as opppose to an ubuntu 16.04 server instance?

The differences in the desktop and server editions for Ubuntu 16.04 can be found here.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

J0991
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1 Answers1

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It sounds like none of those differences apply in this case.

  1. The differences of the CD contents wouldn't apply as the image is already built. At this point, you are installing packages from apt repositories which are the same for Desktop or Server.
  2. The installer doesn't matter since we are not installing Ubuntu. We are just pulling a box that is pre-installed.
  3. Before 12.04 it appears there was a different kernel for the server version. But this doesn't apply to 16.04 and there are not separate kernels.
  4. The support was only 3 years for 12.04 but this has increased to 5. Doesn't apply here.

Furthermore, if we actually look at the Packer templates for the Bento builds we can see it actually builds of the server ISO anyways: https://github.com/chef/bento/blob/master/ubuntu-16.04-amd64.json#L265

So, the answer to the question is: Yes, it is already built off the server ISO. But furthermore, it shouldn't matter in a Vagrant image setting.

Andy Shinn
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  • Wow! Awesome answer. Thank you for being so thorough. This is great to hear as I was half broken-hearted I wouldn't be able to test my recipes on the same operating system the recipes are ultimately being applied to. Thank you very much! – J0991 Jun 13 '17 at 21:19
  • To confirm from the Chef project side, we only build server images as they intended for infrastructure testing. – coderanger Jun 14 '17 at 02:29