Corona is a library for creating and managing virtual machines from Common Lisp. All you need is VirtualBox and an internet connection.
Corona uses Vagrant Cloud as a source of base systems to bootstrap virtual machines from.
(defmachine my-app
:system (:ubuntu :14.04 :64)
:memory 1024)
(start my-app)
(stop my-app)That's it.
Corona can be used to create isolated, reproducible development environments so you and your team can work on the same system.
No more 'works on my machine', no more difference between development and production.
If you have a library that uses an external tool, like a database server or something equally large, you can use Corona to set up a virtual machine and install whatever dependencies you need, so the user doesn't actually have to run anything on their computer.
Additionally, since you can set up multiple virtual machines with different systems, you can use Corona to ensure your library works on most operating systems. This is especially useful for testing compilers and similar applications where portability is critical.
You can use Corona as a build server: Fire up virtual machines of the operating system you want to build on, set them up with everything you need, and run the builds.
Machines are defined with the defmachine macro. The first argument to
defmachine is a symbol, which will be the machine's name (Including the
package). The other arguments are:
system
: This is a system triple, a literal list with three elements which uniquely
identifies a base system: The system's name, version, and architecture.
memory
: The amount of RAM given to the VM in megabytes. Default: 512.
cpu-count
: The number of virtual CPUs. One by default.
ip
: The system's IP address. By default this is not used.
Examples:
(defmachine my-app:db-server
:system (:debian :7.4 :32)
:memory 2048
:ip "192.128.65.20")
(defmachine my-app:web-server
:system (:freebsd :10.0 :64)
:memory 512
:cpu-count 2)The following six functions can be used to control the state of the virtual machines:
start, stop
: Start and shut down the VM. If possible, shut it down gently.
pause, resume
: Pause and resume the VM.
reboot
: Reboot the virtual machine.
poweroff
: Force VM shutdown.
Examples:
(start my-app:web-server)
;; Do some work
(pause my-app:web-server)
;; Come back to work next morning
(resume my-app:web-server)
;; Shut it down
(stop my-app:web-server)The advantage over Vagrant is simply that it's written in Common Lisp and, as such, available in Quicklisp without any external commands. This way, the library can be included as a dependency and used without anyone having to set up an external tool other than VirtualBox.
Everything is stored in specific subdirectories under
~/.config/corona/. Vagrant Cloud images are stored, in their extracted form,
in ~/.config/corona/files/vagrant-cloud/. The disk images of virtual machines
are stored in ~/.config/corona/files/virtual-machines.
Virtual machines are identified by a name, which is a Common Lisp symbol. Inside the VM directory, all the data for a virtual machine is stored inside a folder for the package and another folder for the symbol name. For example:
virtual-machines/
COMMON-LISP/
TEST-VM/
UBUNTU-PERSONAL/
MY-APP/
TESTING/
STAGING/
The names of your virtual machines are restricted by the limitations of your
filesystem (Allowed characters, pathname length, etc.). Rather than add specific
checks for meaningless edge cases, I'll just warn you not to name your virtual
machines myapp:My/Test\<<VM>>.
Copyright (c) 2014-2015 Fernando Borretti ([email protected])
Licensed under the MIT License.