Speeding up Kitchen converges with Squid

Posted on 2 mins to read

One day, you may find yourself smoking too often or drinking a lot of coffee while waiting for the files to be downloaded during provisioning of Vagrant / Kitchen VMs. E.g: JDK size is ~200 MB and it may take a dozen of minutes to download during the execution of the java recipe. You can save precious seconds of your life with Squid. Though some configuration is required, it wont take more than 5 minutes.

First you need to download and install Squid. Many operating systems include Squid in their ports/packages system. This is an easy way to get Squid up and running quickly, and a good way to keep up-to-date with Squid versions supported by your operating system. In some cases, you may want (or be forced) to download a binary package of Squid. They are available for a variety of platforms, including Windows.

Latest Squid versions by default do not use disk cache, only in-memory caches. This won’t work for huge binaries like JDK, so we’ll tune the configs. I’m assuming the reader is using Linux, and the configuration examples will target this OS. Enable disk caching by adding / uncommenting this line in the config:

cache_dir ufs /var/cache/squid 10240 16 256

10240 MB ought to be enough for anybody.

Then, increase maximum size of the objects that can be cached:

maximum_object_size 500 MB

Provide a refresh pattern for the files you want to cache:

refresh_pattern -i \.tar\.gz$   10080   100%    43200 override-expire ignore-no-cache ignore-no-store ignore-no-private

Now, stop Squid (if it’s running) and re-create cache directories with squid -z.

Last thing left is to enable Squid proxy for Vagrant / Kitchen. Add these lines to a file named .kitchen.local.yml (it is gitignored by default):

provisioner:
  http_proxy: http://192.168.100.20:3128
  https_proxy: http://192.168.100.20:3128
  no_proxy: localhost, 127.0.0.1

192.168.100.20 here is the IP of your Squid-powered computer as it is seen from VirtualBox’s (or whatever the driver is) network. It may be your host machine (running Vagrant / Kitchen), but 127.0.0.1 and localhost obviously won’t work, because the IP must be accessible from the Vagrant / Kitchen VM. Though https_proxy is listed here, intercepting and caching HTTPS traffic has some nuances. And don’t forget to exclude localhost from being proxed or some things may fail to work properly!

Start Squid and enjoy faster provisioning!