Support for infrastructure update

It would be nice if the creator supported infrastructure update - leave the existing virtual machines (or delete/add new, if the new sandbox.yml defines to do so) and vagrant configuration (.vagrant directory) and only work with provisioning files + run the provisioning.

Example usecase: In the K4I project, our applications are in continuous development. Our "client" wants to run the latest versions (because of new features/bugfixes/whatever). However, it is quite time-consuming to rebuild the infrastructure (~6 VMs) each time there is an update in any of the components and therefore we cannot use the creator for this purpose. So it is done by hand - copy new data + ansible roles to sandbox/provisioning, copy extra-vars to sandbox/user_files and run vagrant rsync + vagrant provision. This gets even more complicated if we want to add a new application (and therefore new VM) because we must edit the Vagrantfile manually.

added feature nice to have labels

@469192 Does it mean you request some kind of "sandbox update" feature?

Technically, anything new/changed will be added/updated to Vagrantfile and/or Ansible provisioning folder?

exactly - I think that technically it should be enough to just replace everything related to Ansible (provisioning + extra_vars I think) with the new files and also replace Vagrantfile with the new one. Vagrant should notice the changes (I just tried to add another VM into my Vagrantfile and vagrant status shown it as not created - however, I'm not sure if it can notice that I want to remove some VM, but that's not the main point here).

I believe this would make it much easier to work with the sandbox once it's created - updating the VMs, adding more VMs to sandbox, etc. without the need for destroying and rebuilding it from scratch.

marked this issue as related to #33 (closed)

I see two separate issues here (if I understand it correctly). The first is to update provisioning files and do the provisioning on certain VMs without destroying them. That can be done in the future, but do you expect that CSC will assist you with updating the files? For instance, you give CSC a definition (as usual), you choose --update, and it will update all provisioning files, recognize changes, and automatically run provisioning on machines which was changed. This functionality is logically something between sandbox creator and sandbox runner, but it can be done.

The other issue is to change the Vagrantfile while the machine is running. That is not a good idea, and usually Vagrant does not like it. Maybe we can go around that by automatically destroying the machine that is being updated, update and run again. I need to investigate the possibilities.

This feature is not planned to be included in 2.0, but most attributes for provisioning will be moved from the Vagrantfile to a separate file. That should make the changes and provisioning on running machines easier.

changed milestone to %Major release 3.0.0

set weight to 2

changed milestone to %Minor release 3.1.0