minimal

Welcome to Minimal!

Minimal Vagrant boxes strive to be as stripped-down as possible, while still being very useful.

Each box is created with 512MB RAM, an 80GB ephemeral disk, installed with the absolute minimum of packages possible via the package manager, and configured per the Vagrant Base Box Creation Guide (https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/boxes/base.html). Next opensshd, vim, and git are installed, opensshd is set to start on boot, and that's it. This creates a very lean image which is faster to download, faster to provision, and uses very little RAM – most images use between 20MB and 40MB, per the output of 'free -m'. This allows you to host greater numbers of concurrent VMs on your hardware, and has fewer 'pre-installed, almost-configured' packages to get in your way or break in subtle ways.

Right now Minimal tracks 64-bit CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu Linux distributions for the Virtualbox provider. If you have ideas on how we can make these images even more lean and mean (while still retaining baseline functionality), please don't hesitate to let us know at minimal@fuzzy-logic.org.