I wanted to try building my own Vagrant base box, I decided to use one of the chef bento templates for ease.

It was moving along nicely, downloaded the ISO, verified the checksum and suddenly this error appears.

VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component MachineWrap, interface IMachine packer

Not quite sure where to start I decided to do a quick Google, read some posts about VirtualBox modules. I was quite sure that wasn’t my issue. So I went to GitHub where I saw a couple of issues that said set headless to true. Being new to packer, I didn’t really understand what that meant. After more reading I finally found it and decided I’d make this quick post about it.

$ cd packer_templates/ubuntu
$ packer build -var 'headless=true' -only=virtualbox-iso ubuntu-18.04-amd64.json

That’s all I needed and likely all you need if you’re having this issue as well. As long as you have ran sudo /sbin/vboxconfig and have the modules successfully loaded.

Use the Packer Image with Vagrant

Either move into or copy the image to your current directory and use the following commands.

vagrant box add ubuntu18 ubuntu-1804.box

vagrant init ubuntu18

vagrant up

Enjoy your new Virtual Box!