====== LOFAR software on a vagrant box ======

The LOFAR software stack can be installed into virtual machines to run jobs in distributed infrastructures or just to develop locally software that depends on LOFAR without the need to use a remote cluster.

One convenient option to encapsulate a Virtual Machine is the use of [[http://www.vagrantup.com/|Vagrant]]. 

A LOFAR box based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is provided in: [[http://www.roe.ac.uk/~jsm/lofar_vm/LOFAR_precise64.box]] (warning ~4GB)

Steps to run locally a LOFAR vagrant box:
  * Install VirtualBox: [[https://www.virtualbox.org/]]
  * Install vagrant: [[http://www.vagrantup.com/]]
  * Create a working directory.
  * Run ''vagrant box add lofar http://www.roe.ac.uk/~jsm/lofar_vm/LOFAR_precise64.box''. This can take a long time. The size of the virtual machine (VM) to be downloaded is ~ 4 GB.
  * Run ''vagrant init''.
  * Run ''vagrant up'' and wait for the VM to load.
  * When the last step is ready you can access your LOFAR VM with ''vagrant ssh''.

The software and recipes of the project can be found in: [[https://github.com/nudomarinero/lofar_software]]\\
The recipes to create the Ubuntu 12.04 box are in: [[https://github.com/nudomarinero/lofar_software/tree/master/vagrant_precise64]]