# chef/bento

Packer templates for building minimal Vagrant baseboxes for multiple platforms

Repository: https://github.com/chef/bento
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/chef-bento
Language: HCL
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: packer-templates, vagrant, parallels, vmware, virtualbox, macos, windows, freebsd, linux, ubuntu, amazon, centos, packer, vmware-fusion, vmware-workstation, redhat, rhel, oracle
Last push: 2026-08-08T00:46:49+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 89/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 96, release rhythm 75, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5292, "days_push": 26, "days_rel": 86, "gap_med": 76, "n_releases_24m": 4}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4445, forks 1116 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:50.366047+00:00)

## What it is
Bento is a collection of Packer templates for building minimal Vagrant base boxes across many operating systems and virtualization providers. It also publishes prebuilt boxes to Vagrant Cloud that serve as defaults for kitchen-vagrant.

## Use cases
- build a minimal ubuntu vagrant box with packer
- create baseboxes for test-kitchen
- generate vagrant boxes for virtualbox and vmware
- build arm64 vagrant boxes on apple silicon
- customize a centos or debian box image with packer variables
- use prebuilt bento boxes in a Vagrantfile

## When to choose
- you need reproducible, minimal Vagrant base boxes for testing
- you use Test Kitchen with kitchen-vagrant and want consistent boxes
- you need boxes across many OSes and hypervisors including arm64

## When to avoid
- you build cloud images for AWS/Azure rather than local Vagrant boxes
- you need container images instead of full VMs
- you want a GUI-driven VM management tool

## Facets
- artifact type: infra-config
- maturity: active
- function: infrastructure-as-code, developer-tools
- domain: developer-tools, self-hosted
- platform: windows, cross-platform
- tags: packer-templates, vagrant-baseboxes, virtualbox, vmware, parallels, qemu, hyper-v, test-kitchen, virtualization, devops, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- chef/bento (main) score 89

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:50.366047+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:20:48.453281+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/chef/bento (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:50.366047+00:00, sha 26caf0f2f262)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.