Managing Virtual Machines

The intended use case is to build and test Qt on VMs managed with minicoin, and to run test cases (such as from bug reports or during package testing), on a wide range of platforms.

For a full list of commands, run minicoin list-commands, and for detailed help to each command, run

$ minicoin <command> --help

The most important command, run, is documented separately at Running Jobs.

Basic machine operations

Basic machine operations are identical to regular Vagrant workflows for multi-machine environments, with some minicoin specific extensions.

To see which machines are declared, run

$ minicoin list (minicoin extension)

To list them together with their status, run

$ minicoin status

This can take a long time, as vagrant needs to query each provider. It's often enough to check a single machine, e.g.:

$ minicoin status ubuntu2004

To start a machine, run

$ minicoin up [machine-name]

This will download the virtual machine image if needed, boot up the machine, and run provisioning actions.

Note: Running just $ minicoin up is not possible, as this would bring up all machines, downloading several dozen GB of base box images, and possibly killing the host. Also, note that machines might rely on private boxes.

You can apply operations to multiple machines if you provide the machine name as a ruby-style regular expression, i.e. the following would shut down all Windows machines:

$ minicoin halt -f /windows/

Use minicoin status /regexp/ to see which machines would be impacted by your expression (the above would also stop a machine named no-windows-here).

To destroy a machine, run

$ minicoin destroy -f ubuntu2004

Note: Any data that lives only on the machine will be lost.

To update a machine, run

$ minicoin box update [machine-name]

Note that this will only update the base image. To update the VM that gets run, you'll need to recreate (destroy, then up) the machine.

Other useful commands suspend to freeze the machine (restart with resume), and the snapshot sub-commands to save known good states of machines (for instance, after provisioning or cloning).

To destroy all (!) machines without prompting, run

$ minicoin destroy -f