Running Eclipse Che on your laptop inside a Vagrant VM

Let me first introduce myself briefly in this first post on this Eclipse Che blog. I am Olivier Berger, a research engineer at Telecom SudParis, in Évry, France. I am teaching software development, and I have been working on ways to improve our teaching environments with help of various virtualization technologies (containers, k8s, etc.).

I have become quite interested, in the latest month, in the Eclipse Che project. Eclipse Che powers Eclipse “on the Cloud”, making available software development environments, for developers, on a Kubernetes Cloud. Developers typically work from a Web page instead of installing local development tools.

I intend to test the use of Eclipse Che in multi-user mode in a teaching context, but deploying Kubernetes takes time, as running stuff on Kubernetes isn’t exactly trivial, at least when you’re like me and want to use a “vanilla” kubernetes. I prefer to be able to test stuff in a VM on my laptop, for a start without having to use any Cloud out there (call me an old f*rt), or asking our IT department to invest time in k8s installation and configuration.

I have mainly been running k8s inside VMs using Vagrant and/or minikube, so far, for other experiments conducted in the context of Antidote, as I wanted to make sure Antidote and Eclipse Che are not incompatible (I may be presenting Antidote, a network learning labs platform, to the Eclipse Che community in a future post).

I have then made my own Eclipse Che Vagrant setup which can be used to test-drive Eclipse Che in a VM, locally.

Vagrant is a venerable virtualization tool that controls virtual machines/environments for development or test purposes. It predates the containers era and is quite popular in some communities who may not have yet fully embraced the Cloud wave. In short, it can offer a handy way to download and test a VM image locally, and apply provisioning scripts (here, a k8s deployment, and chectl’s invocation). Kubernetes is installed inside the VM with minikube using the “none” driver, thus directly over Docker inside the VM, which is an alternative to the traditional setup where Minikube will be starting a VM of its own. This setup is actually quite similar to deploying Eclipse Che over KinD (Kubernetes in Docker).

I’ve captured this installation in the following demo :

Maybe this will prove useful to others. Feel free to file issues or clone the repo at https://gitlab.com/olberger/vagrant-minikube-eclipse-che/