Vagrant - Virtualized development for the masses

Vagrant - Virtualized development for the masses

What is Vagrant?

Development environments made easy.

Create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.

Why Vagrant Changes Everything

Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, maximizes dev/prod parity, and makes the "works on my machine" excuse a relic of the past.

Developers no longer need to worry about setting up complicated infrastructure components. Projects with conflicting dependencies can each get their own sandbox -- keeping a developer's workstation free of the hacks needed for multiple versions of software to coexist.

Operations engineers no longer need to worry about developers having a different local setup from production. They can experiment and test their configuration management changes before going live.

Not convinced? Read more about why Vagrant is right for you.

Installation

Install using the operating system specific package

Debian/Ubuntu - deb package

Arch Linux - pkg.tar.xz

RHEL/CentOS/Oracle - rpm package

Windows - msi

Mac OS X - dmg

Install as gem - platform independent, ONLY recommended for 1.0.x

 $ gem install vagrant
 $ vagrant box add {title} {url}
 $ vagrant init {title}
 $ vagrant up

Setup Your First Instance

Vagrant is so easy to use that you can get your first virtual machine up and running in just 3 easy steps:

$ vagrant box add precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box
$ mkdir precise64
$ cd precise64
$ vagrant init precise64
$ vagrant up

Vagrant

http://vagrantup.com/

Boxes

Installing a Box

Boxes can be installed from the filesystem or via HTTP (note that if you’re interested, it’s quite easy to extend this to support more protocols). No matter the source, the installation method is the same. The following adds a box named precise64 to a local vagrant installation

$ vagrant box add precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box

Since vagrant 1.2.x, user can specify the provider that backs the box by using the --provider option

Usage: vagrant box add <name> <url> [--provider provider] [-h]
    -f, --force                      Overwrite an existing box if it exists.
        --insecure                   If set, SSL certs will not be validated.
        --provider provider          The provider that backs the box.
    -h, --help

The name used with the vagrant box add command is the name used to reference the box from that point forward. Any box can be named anything you want. Boxes that are added using vagrant box add are global to the vagrant install, and they are stored at ~/.vagrant.d/boxes on the local filesystem.

Note: The default Vagrantfile created with vagrant init defaults to using a box named "base". It is a good practice to specify a proper name. The name of the box is NOT significant in any way other than to logically identify the box in a Vagrantfile or from the command line.

Removing Boxes

Boxes can be removed (the deletion is permanent) from ~/.vagrant.d/boxes. The following is an example command to remove a box.

$ vagrant box remove box_name

If you tried to run this command, it will obviously fail, since you haven’t added a box named "box_name" yet.

Once a box is removed, no new virtual machines based on that box can be created, since it is completely deleted off the filesystem, but existing virtual machines which have already been spun up will continue to function properly.

Destroying Boxes

Once you have finished testing and don't need the test environment (instance) any more, you can destroy (delete it from VirtualBox Default Machine Folder) with vagrant destroy.

$ vagrant destroy box_name

Change Vagrant Home

By default VAGRANT_HOME is ~/.vagrant.d

To change it, in terminal

export VAGRANT_HOME=/path/to/vagrant

To make it permanent, add the above to ~/.bash_profile (works for Interactive login shell and Non-interactive login shell).

Cheat sheet

Commands

Most users will use these commands every days:

vagrant status

vagrant status # has box?
vagrant box # add remove list or package box
vagrant init # build Vagrantfile
vagrant up # turn on the box
vagrant suspend # pause the box
vagrant resume # resume the box
vagrant halt # shutdown box
vagrant reload # restart box
vagrant destroy # destroy the test environment
vagrant ssh # open box
vagrant provision # run provisioner

For more on these commands, please check the built in help:

vagrant gem -h
vagrant package -h
vagrant ssh-config -h

Vagrant Plugins

Chef

Local Domain Resolution

/etc/resolver approach

vagrant-dns (using rubydns)
vagrant-dnsmasq (using dnsmasq)

/etc/hosts approach

Providers

Provisioners

See => https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/wiki/Available-Vagrant-Plugins

Vagrant Base Boxes

A list of places where you can get all sorts of vagrant base boxes for different purposes: development, testing or even production.

A list of A lit of base boxes for Vagrant
vagrantbox.es
Opscode bento (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora)
https://github.com/opscode/bento URLs and Veewee definitions
NOTE: For hidden bento boxes, access the root context of AWS S3 storage server directly => https://opscode-vm-bento.s3.amazonaws.com/
Puppet Labs Vagrant Boxes
http://puppet-vagrant-boxes.puppetlabs.com/
Veewee definitions https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet-vagrant-boxes
Vagrant Cloud Images - Ubuntu
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/

Reference

Vagrant Getting Started Guide v1 v2

Vagrant Documentation v1 v2

http://railscasts.com/episodes/292-virtual-machines-with-vagrant

Terry : Vagrant