Caching bigger downloads on the host machine would speed up rebuild times for the vm

[lo5an]

Saving bigger downloads in a cache in the mounted /vagrant folder would speed up subsequent rebuild times.

[ruebot]

Thoughts on adding the downloads folder to the repo? This would close the ticket, but it would also make the repo bigger, and we'd be distributing a bunch of binaries.

[lo5an]

I like the idea of the script downloading stuff, but then caching it between machine rebuilds. I don't think we want to keep our own copy of the binaries.

[ruebot]

Welp, it looks like we can't even do it!

$ git push origin issue-21 
Counting objects: 14, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (12/12), done.
Writing objects: 100% (12/12), 345.71 MiB | 1.20 MiB/s, done.
Total 12 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: warning: File downloads/fits-0.8.4_0.zip is 70.63 MB; this is larger than GitHub's recommended maximum file size of 50 MB
remote: error: GH001: Large files detected.
remote: error: Trace: 9cd5e4b75ac0b6a2810a79d8c84faadd
remote: error: See http://git.io/iEPt8g for more information.
remote: error: File downloads/fcrepo-installer-3.8.0.jar is 145.32 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100 MB
remote: error: File downloads/solr-4.2.0.tgz is 111.14 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100 MB
To git@github.com:Islandora-Labs/islandora_vagrant.git
 ! [remote rejected] issue-21 -> issue-21 (pre-receive hook declined)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:Islandora-Labs/islandora_vagrant.git'

So, I guess we're good to go with b3ec9b4 closing the ticket. If that's the case, I'll let @lo5an decide since he created the issue.

[whikloj]

There is also the possibility of:

1. Replace apt-get with apt-get -d to download source into the downloads directory.
2. Use dpkg -i to install the packages from the downloads directory.
   This would extend the download once, install many idea. Just not sure how it would handle dependencies.

[ruebot]

...and we should probably add downloads to .gitignore?

[ruebot]

@whikloj++ #28

[lo5an]

Maybe a vagrant plugin like https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-cachier would be better for caching system packages?

Updated to expand:

I've only been using vagrant-cachier for a week or so, but it's been working well so far, and I like that it handles more than just .debs. It seems to be a reasonably active project, and it's nice and modular, so we could recommend that people use it without making it a dependency. I've got the vagrant-cachier config in a Vagrantfile in my lookup path so that it applies to all of my vagrant vms.

[lo5an]

That said, caching OS packages is definitely beyond the scope of what I was originally thinking, so I'm happy to mark this as closed and create a new issue for package caching :-)