Best practices and available tools have improved substantially since original creation of this issue, motivating its rekindling and generalization beyond VirtualBox.

The OP will have been addressed when two use-cases are treated:

1. spawning an instance on AWS that has the current release of TuLiP installed;
2. running (possibly after building on-demand) an image of a 64-bit Linux distribution in VirtualBox that has TuLiP installed.

In both cases, the process of round-trip usage on a local host should be demonstrated and documented. E.g., editing an existing example locally, running it remotely, and getting a copy of the results locally.

The second use-case is addressed, and the proposed solution is available as a Vagrant file under contrib/. It has been tested both locally under Linux x86_64 and also on a remote host with non-superuser capabilities; the latter is documented at contrib/nonroot-vagrant-instructions.md.

I shifted the first use-case to a later milestone because it may require a few iterations to arrive at a reliable solution because achieving round-trip file manipulation for an EC2 instance on AWS in a more sophisticated manner than repeated usage of scp is difficult. Furthermore, my Vagrantfile includes a script that is known to be sufficient for bootstrapping a fresh Ubuntu installation, so delaying the current release for this issue is not well motivated.

For the first use-case, I propose to use Ansible, which can be written to support multiple cloud computing providers. I can most quickly develop this for AWS and GCP.