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I'm getting started with provisioning a development VM for developing web apps.

To do this, I'm using Vagrant. Vagrant allows you to use a base "box" (virtual machine disk image?) that contains an operating system of my choice. For starters I chose this one: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/hashicorp/boxes/precise32.

I noticed that after provisioning a VM with that box, then logging in, that there are already a number of ruby gems installed:

vagrant@precise32:~$ gem list --local

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

bunny (0.7.9)
chef (10.14.2)
erubis (2.7.0)
facter (1.6.12)
highline (1.6.15)
ipaddress (0.8.0)
json (1.6.1)
mime-types (1.19)
mixlib-authentication (1.3.0)
mixlib-cli (1.2.2)
mixlib-config (1.1.2)
mixlib-log (1.4.1)
mixlib-shellout (1.1.0)
moneta (0.6.0)
net-ssh (2.5.2, 2.2.2)
net-ssh-gateway (1.1.0)
net-ssh-multi (1.1)
ohai (6.14.0)
polyglot (0.3.3)
puppet (2.7.19)
rest-client (1.6.7)
systemu (2.5.2)
treetop (1.4.10)
uuidtools (2.1.3)
yajl-ruby (1.1.0)

I'm trying to figure out why these gems are here. Is it normal that a distribution of Ubuntu would include them, perhaps because other software relies on them? In particular, I'm confused why chef is already installed on this system.

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On the hub you mention (https://atlas.hashicorp.com) every creator can publish her own build and share it for free.

Thought this is not obligated most of the times a box is created with a lot of provisioners in mind. Especially a box made by Hashicorp should support many provisioners (puppet, chef, salt, ansible, docker etc).

Furthermore these gems will not harm any other applications except if you do Ruby* tasks. But you can always override/delete etc these gems.

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  • So if I were to download Ubuntu fresh from ubuntu.com (ubuntu.com/download), then presumably those gems would not be installed?
    – Brian
    Jul 6, 2015 at 15:00
  • @Brian Yes. Ruby is not installed by default. Jul 6, 2015 at 17:09

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