If you have access to a cloud environment, you can use Juju to automate this entire process. Have a look in the charms directory, a README.md file in there provides instructions to prepare the 3 items of required configuration and deploy tarmac in 4 steps.

If your tarmac-running user is named "ubuntu" these instructions should work out-of-the-box. If you want it run by a different user, see "Running as a different (non-ubuntu) user".

1. Get an Ubuntu 13.04 box

2. Install a few packages and clone tarmac and the tarmac configs (this!):

    $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zkrynicki/vagrant
    $ sudo apt-get update
    $ sudo apt-get install vagrant bzr git python-bzrlib pastebinit
    $ mkdir -p ~/.config
    $ git clone git://github.com/checkbox/tarmac-configs.git ~/.config/tarmac
    $ git clone git://github.com/checkbox/tarmac.git ~/tarmac
    $ sudo cp ~/.config/tarmac/tarmac-lander.conf /etc/init
   

3. Create a directory to cache branches:

    $ sudo mkdir /var/lib/tarmac && sudo chown ubuntu.ubuntu /var/lib/tarmac
   

4. Set the user that tarmac will use on launchpad:

    $ bzr launchpad-login <your-launchpad-login>.
   

5. Tarmac needs to be able to access launchpad with its own ssh key, so generate an ssh key for the user:

    $ ssh-keygen -O source-address=your_external_ip_address
    (select no passphrase)
   

   then add .ssh/id_rsa.pub to your launchpad authorized keys

6. As the tarmac-running user, or globally, do bzr branch lp:some-project, this is so that launchpad's ssh host keys are known to the user, otherwise an Invalid host key error will appear.

7. Edit configurations to suit your needs:

   • Edit .config/tarmac and set branch_root to the location for your tarmac local branches.
   • Edit /etc/init/tarmac-lander.conf and set HOME, PYTHONPATH, TARMAC_DIR and TARMAC_CONFIG to the appropriate values.

8. Authenticate tarmac to launchpad:

    $ cd ~/tarmac
    $ PYTHONPATH=. ./bin/tarmac authenticate
   

Now you're ready to start running tarmac.

• To run once, do

    sudo start tarmac-lander
  

• To run periodically, set up a cron entry that does the above as often as you want. Example:

    $ echo "*/10 * * * * root /sbin/start tarmac-lander >/dev/null" | sudo tee /etc/cron.d/tarmac-lander
  

  Or if you want to run hourly:

    $ echo "/sbin/start tarmac-lander >/dev/null" | sudo tee /etc/cron.hourly/tarmac-lander
  

To speed up frequent testing, use apt-cacher-ng to cache downloaded packages:

$ sudo apt-get install apt-cacher-ng

Then add the following to /etc/init/tarmac-lander.conf, along with the other environment variables:

env VAGRANT_APT_CACHE=http://<your ip address>:3142

To put the virtual machines on ramdisk:

About 1.5 GB RAM are needed for a VM's virtual disk, plus about 1 GB for the host and VM RAM. VMs are destroyed after each use, so the ramdisk space can be reused. To be entirely safe, 3 GB total RAM are recommended if you want to use this, to allow for some breathing room.

1. Add this to /etc/fstab:

    tmpfs /ramdisk tmpfs defaults,size=2000m,uid=ubuntu 0 0
   

2. Create /ramdisk:

    $ mkdir /ramdisk
   

3. Mount /ramdisk:

    $ sudo mount -a
   

4. As the user that will run tarmac, ask virtualbox to keep VMs by default in the ramdisk:

    $ VBoxManage setproperty machinefolder /ramdisk/vms
   

1. Modify step 3 to make /var/lib/tarmac owned by your non-ubuntu user.
2. Edit /etc/init/tarmac-lander.conf and change setuid ubuntu to your user, and all instances of /home/ubuntu to your user's home directory.