Cleaning up a Vagrant box before packaging

cleanup.md

I tested the following script on a vagrant box.

The box was 850MB without the script, and 450 MB with the script.

The script was taken from chef/bento with just one modification.

vagrant-cleanup.sh

#!/bin/bash -eux

# source is: https://github.com/chef/bento/blob/master/packer/scripts/ubuntu/cleanup.sh
# only modification is the "try catch" (air quotes) for dd - since that snipped was taken from another context

# delete all linux headers
dpkg --list | awk '{ print $2 }' | grep linux-headers | xargs apt-get -y purge

# this removes specific linux kernels, such as
# linux-image-3.11.0-15-generic but
# * keeps the current kernel
# * does not touch the virtual packages, e.g.'linux-image-generic', etc.
#
dpkg --list | awk '{ print $2 }' | grep 'linux-image-3.*-generic' | grep -v `uname -r` | xargs apt-get -y purge

# delete linux source
dpkg --list | awk '{ print $2 }' | grep linux-source | xargs apt-get -y purge

# delete development packages
dpkg --list | awk '{ print $2 }' | grep -- '-dev$' | xargs apt-get -y purge

# delete compilers and other development tools
apt-get -y purge cpp gcc g++

# delete X11 libraries
apt-get -y purge libx11-data xauth libxmuu1 libxcb1 libx11-6 libxext6

# delete obsolete networking
apt-get -y purge ppp pppconfig pppoeconf

# delete oddities
apt-get -y purge popularity-contest

apt-get -y autoremove
apt-get -y clean
rm -rf VBoxGuestAdditions_*.iso VBoxGuestAdditions_*.iso.?
rm -f /tmp/chef*deb

# with the e flag set, we have to "catch" the error dd is gonna trigger when it fills up the disk
{
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/EMPTY bs=1M
} || {
    rm -f /EMPTY
}
# Block until the empty file has been removed, otherwise, Packer
# will try to kill the box while the disk is still full and that's bad
sync