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Building Debian 13 Trixie Vagrant Image

Raju Vindane

Raju Vindane

• 3 min read

I sometimes use Vagrant to deploy my VM's and recently when I tried to deploy one for Trixie, I could see one available. So I checked the official Debian images on Vagrant cloud at https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/vagrant/discover/debian and could not find an image for trixie on Vagrant cloud.

Also looked at other cloud image sources like Docker hub, and I could see an image their for Trixie. So I looked into how I can generate a Vagrant image locally for Debian to use.

make install-build-deps



Searched on Salsa and stumbled upon https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-vagrant-images

Cloned the repo from salsa

$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-vagrant-images.git

Install the build dependencies

$ make install-build-deps

this will install some dependency packages, will ask for sudo password if need to install something not already installed.

Let's call make help 

$ make help
To run this makefile, run:
   make <DIST>-<CLOUD>-<ARCH>
  WHERE <DIST> is bullseye, buster, stretch, sid or testing
    And <CLOUD> is azure, ec2, gce, generic, genericcloud, nocloud, vagrant, vagrantcontrib
    And <ARCH> is amd64, arm64, ppc64el
Set DESTDIR= to write images to given directory.

$ make trixie-vagrant-amd64
umask 022; \
./bin/debian-cloud-images build \
  trixie vagrant amd64 \
  --build-id vagrant-cloud-images-master \
  --build-type official
usage: debian-cloud-images build
debian-cloud-images build: error: argument RELEASE: invalid value: trixie
make: *** [Makefile:22: trixie-vagrant-amd64] Error 2

As you can see, trixie is not even in the available options and it is not building as well. Before trying to look at updating the codebase, I looked at the pending MR's on Salsa and found Michael Ablassmeier's pending merge request at https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-vagrant-images/-/merge_requests/18

So let me test that commit and see if I can build trixie locally from Michael's MR

$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-vagrant-images.git
Cloning into 'debian-vagrant-images'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 5310, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (256/256), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (96/96), done.
remote: Total 5310 (delta 141), reused 241 (delta 135), pack-reused 5054 (from 1)
Receiving objects: 100% (5310/5310), 629.81 KiB | 548.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2875/2875), done.

$ cd debian-vagrant-images/

$ git checkout 8975eb0 #the commit id of MR

Now let's see if we can build trixie now

$ make help
To run this makefile, run:
   make <DIST>-<CLOUD>-<ARCH>
  WHERE <DIST> is bullseye, buster, stretch, sid or testing
    And <CLOUD> is azure, ec2, gce, generic, genericcloud, nocloud, vagrant, vagrantcontrib
    And <ARCH> is amd64, arm64, ppc64el
Set DESTDIR= to write images to given directory.



$ make trixie-vagrant-amd64
umask 022; \
./bin/debian-cloud-images build \
  trixie vagrant amd64 \
  --build-id vagrant-cloud-images-master \
  --build-type official
2025-09-17 00:36:25,919 INFO Adding class DEBIAN
2025-09-17 00:36:25,919 INFO Adding class CLOUD
2025-09-17 00:36:25,919 INFO Adding class TRIXIE
2025-09-17 00:36:25,920 INFO Adding class VAGRANT
2025-09-17 00:36:25,920 INFO Adding class AMD64
2025-09-17 00:36:25,920 INFO Adding class LINUX_IMAGE_BASE
2025-09-17 00:36:25,920 INFO Adding class GRUB_PC
2025-09-17 00:36:25,920 INFO Adding class LAST
2025-09-17 00:36:25,921 INFO Running FAI: sudo env PYTHONPATH=/home/rajudev/dev/salsa/michael/debian-vagrant-images/src/debian_cloud_images/build/../.. CLOUD_BUILD_DATA=/home/rajudev/dev/salsa/michael/debian-vagrant-images/src/debian_cloud_images/data CLOUD_BUILD_INFO={"type": "official", "release": "trixie", "release_id": "13", "release_baseid": "13", "vendor": "vagrant", "arch": "amd64", "build_id": "vagrant-cloud-images-master", "version": "20250917-1"} CLOUD_BUILD_NAME=debian-trixie-vagrant-amd64-official-20250917-1 CLOUD_BUILD_OUTPUT_DIR=/home/rajudev/dev/salsa/michael/debian-vagrant-images CLOUD_RELEASE_ID=vagrant CLOUD_RELEASE_VERSION=20250917-1 fai-diskimage --verbose --hostname debian --class DEBIAN,CLOUD,TRIXIE,VAGRANT,AMD64,LINUX_IMAGE_BASE,GRUB_PC,LAST --size 100G --cspace /home/rajudev/dev/salsa/michael/debian-vagrant-images/src/debian_cloud_images/build/fai_config debian-trixie-vagrant-amd64-official-20250917-1.raw

..... continued

Although we can now build the images, we just don't see an option for it in the help text, not even for bookworm. Just the text in Makefile is outdated, but I can build and trixie Vagrant box now. Thanks to Michael for the fix.

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