Create an OS X vagrant box for VMWare Fusion

I need a test OS X system to use in Vagrant. I’m using VMWare Fusion, it supports OS X virtual machines and Vagrant provides an official plugin to work with VMware. VMWare Fusion and the VMWare Vagrant plugin arent’t free, but well worth the money.

Since you cannot download a prepackaged vagrant VMWare OS X box, we’re going to build it ourselves.

This is how I did it:

Install Vagrant, VMWare and the vagrant vmware plugin. Also, install packer, which we will need to build the box. Get the latest installer of Yosemite off the Mac App store. Grab a copy of the osx-vm-templates provided by Tim Sutton.

git clone https://github.com/timsutton/osx-vm-templates.git; cd osx-vm-templates
sudo prepare_iso/prepare_iso.sh /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/ out

Calculate the md5 checksum from the dmg you’ve just created.

md5 out/OSX_InstallESD_10.10.3_14D136.dmg

Run packer. Substitute the MD5_CHECKSUM with the one you just calculated. Also check the DMG filename.

cd packer; packer build \
    -var iso_checksum=43101c86c31406f72b9e45011e754aa3 \
    -var iso_url=../out/OSX_InstallESD_10.10.3_14D136.dmg \
    --only vmware-iso template.json

Grab a cup of coffee. Many cups, actually. This will run for a while.

When it’s done, add the box to vagrant

vagrant box add osx-yosemite packer_vmware-iso_vmware.box

We don’t need the box anymore (it sits right in vagrants cache), so a little housekeeping can’t hurt:

rm packer_vmware-iso_vmware.box
cd ../out; rm OSX_InstallESD_10.10.3_14D136.dmg

That’s it! You can now use the osx-yosemite as a base box in any Vagrantfile on your system.