Installation

As introduced earlier, this setup leverages Vagrant for virtualization, and Bolt for maintenance automation across nodes. Some other tools are also used during the initialization process.

You need to install these dependencies on your machine before continuing.

TLDR: For macOS with Homebrew:

$ brew install jq \
  homebrew/cask/vagrant \
  hashicorp/tap/consul \
  hashicorp/tap/nomad \
  hashicorp/tap/vault \
  puppetlabs/puppet/puppet-bolt

Tweaking HashiBox can be done via environment variables.

These variables can be saved in a .env file at the top-level directory of HashiBox. They will automatically be acknowledged by the Makefile. Make sure to export each of them, like this:

export VAGRANT_PROVIDER=parallels
export UBUNTU_VERSION=23.04-arm64
export VAGRANT_CLIENT_RAM=2048
export VAGRANT_SERVER_RAM=1024
export NOMAD_LICENSE=licensekey

HashiBox supports multiple architectures and Vagrant providers.

Supported environment variables are:

• VAGRANT_PROVIDER: Set the Vagrant provider. Supports virtualbox, vmware_desktop, parallels. Default is virtualbox.
• UBUNTU_VERSION: Set the Ubuntu version. Supports 23.04 (for AMD64), 23.04-arm64 (for ARM64). Default is 23.04.

The Vagrant environment uses a lot of resources. By default it uses 1Go RAM per client nodes (x3) and 512Mo RAM per server nodes (x3). You can change these resources via the following environment variables:

• VAGRANT_CLIENT_RAM: Set the RAM for client nodes. Default is 1024.
• VAGRANT_CLIENT_CPUS: Set the CPUs for client nodes. Default is 1.
• VAGRANT_SERVER_RAM: Set the RAM for server nodes. Default is 512.
• VAGRANT_SERVER_CPUS: Set the CPUs for server nodes. Default is 1.

Consul, Nomad, and Vault Enterprise are supported as well:

• CONSUL_LICENSE: Set the Consul Enterprise license key. If set, Consul Enterprise will be downloaded instead of Consul OSS.
• NOMAD_LICENSE: Set the Nomad Enterprise license key. If set, Nomad Enterprise will be downloaded instead of Nomad OSS.
• VAULT_LICENSE: Set the Vault Enterprise license key. If set, Vault Enterprise will be downloaded instead of Vault OSS.

We now assume you run all commands with the desired environment variables exported.

The init entry of the Makefile:

1. creates the virtual machines;
2. initializes the environment;
3. bootstraps ACLs on Consul and Nomad;
4. starts the services;
5. unseals Vault;
6. configures Consul and Nomad secret engines in Vault.

This automates the whole process. You can run it with:

$ make init

We don't detail every steps to keep this guide as light as possible. Take a look at the Makefile and scripts directory if you wish to better understand how it works.

When done, your .env file will be populated with the following environment variables:

export VAULT_UNSEAL_KEY=<key>
export VAULT_TOKEN=<token>
export CONSUL_HTTP_TOKEN=<token>
export NOMAD_TOKEN=<token>

Given the summary schema in the introduction, here is some information with the appropriate links for each node:

Happy hacking!