Announcing Vaark

[WildSAR]

Dear VirtualBox users...

The Vaark maintainers are happy to announce Vaark’s first public
pre-release (version 0.9.9) at https://vaark.org/

Thanks to all of you who have provided early feedback!

In a Nutshell — We like to call Vaark "The Missing Command Line
Interface for VirtualBox" but it’s also "The Missing Build System for
VirtualBox clusters."

Reproducible Builds — Vaark lets you quickly build and reproducibly
re-build and configure any modern Linux distros. You can define your VM
or a whole cluster of VMs with a very expressive "project file" declaring
as many VMs, networks, and drives as you need to develop your project.

Minimal Rebuilds — Internally, Vaark uses "make", so in a complex
project, it rebuilds only the VMs that are absolutely necessary based on
your configuration changes.

Fast Cloning — Vaark is amazingly fast — with Vaark, you can often
rebuild an entire VMs from scratch in 20-30 seconds. It can even build
multiple VMs in parallel when building or rebuilding a project.

Simple Implementation — Vaark is written entirely in bash, making it
easy to use simple scripting to do almost all system configuration
operations.

Secure — Vaark itself runs entirely in user space on the host — you
don’t need sudo or an admin password to install and use it.

Extensible — Vaark has a simple but powerful "hooks" approach giving
you several different ways to configure the build process for a VM. You
can either script the configuration yourself, or you should also be able
apply any standard configuration tool such as chef, puppet, ansible, etc.
Vaark also provides runtime integrations for configuration scripts written
in python, perl, ruby, and really, any language that can parse JSON.

Quick to Try — Especially if you already have VirtualBox installed, you
can build your first VM very quickly.

Lots of Cool Examples — Have a look at some small-to-large example
projects to get ideas for how you might use it:

https://gitlab.com/robertnielsen/vaark/ ... r/examples

Free, Open Source — Check out our project at
https://gitlab.com/robertnielsen/vaark

Open to Contributors — Think you can help? We’d love to hear from you.

Ready for Feedback — Questions or bug reports? Please email
robert at dakota.org

Enjoy!

Robert
Vaark lead engineer