What is Vagrant?
Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments, sandboxed in a virtual machine. Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases de‐ velopment/production parity, and brings the idea of disposable compute resources down to the desktop.
- Create a virtual machine
- Modify RAM, number of cps etc of the virtual machine
- Setup shared folders
- Boot virtual machine
- Provision software on the machine via a shell script, Chef, Puppet etc
Manage Lifecycle of the Machine
- SSH into the machine
- Shut down the machine
- Destroy the machine (delete all virtual hard drive)
- Suspend or resume the machine
- Package the machine state and distribute it to other developers
Why Vagrant?
- Installations can be difficult
- Configuration is even more difficult
- Manual setups result in difference between development and production
- Multiple projects become very difficult (different configurations)
- Difficult to keep development environments in sync for everyone in the team
Vagrant encourages automation to setup the development environment. Vagrant puts your development environment into a virtual machine, working with multiple projects is easy, because each project just get its own virtual machine. Finally, working with a team is easier than ever, since you can share the virtual machine image. And bringing a new team member on board is as simple as telling them to build their Vagrant machine with a single command.
Setting up Vagrant
1. Install VirtualBox
2. Install Vagrant (Installers for various platforms)
First Vagrant Machine
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
vagrant destroy
The Vagrantfile
mkdir vagrant_ex
cd vagrant_ex
[Vagrantfile for Vagrant 2 goes here]
Boxes
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.box = "precise64"
end
vagrant up
vagrant status
vagrant ssh
By default, Vagrant shares the project directory (the directory with the Vagrantfile) to /vagrant inside the virtual machine. After SSHing into the virtual machine, this can be verified by listing the files in that directory:
vagrant@precise64:~$ ls /vagrant/
Vagrantfile
You can over-ride the shared folder:
config.vm.share_folder "v-root", "/foo", "."
First,anidentifierforthesharedfolder.Inthiscase,byspecifyingv-root,thedefault shared folder that Vagrant sets up is overridden.
Next,/fooisthepathwherethefolderwillexistintheguestmachine.Thispathwill be created if it doesn’t already exist. If it does already exist, the location will be replaced with the contents of the shared folder.
• Thethirdparameter,"."isthepathofthefoldertobesharedfromthehostmachine. This can be an absolute or relative path. If it is relative, like the example, it is relative to the project root. So in the example, it is sharing the project root.
vagrant reload
Restarts the machine with the new configuration
Basic Networking
config.vm.forward_port 80, 8080
vagrant reload
vagrant ssh
cd /vagrant
sudo python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80
vagrant suspend
vagrant status
vagrant up
vagrant halt
vagrant halt --force
vagrant up
vagrant destroy
vagrant status
vagrant destroy --force
vagrant up
Provisioning Vagrant VM
Create a provision.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "Installing Apache and setting it up..."
apt-get update >/dev/null 2>&1
apt-get install -y apache2 >/dev/null 2>&1
rm -rf /var/www
ln -fs /vagrant /var/www
Add this line to Vagrantfile
config.vm.provision "shell", path: "provision.sh"
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.box = "precise64" config.vm.forward_port 80, 8080 config.vm.provision "shell", path: "provision.sh"
end
vagrant up
Boxes
Boxes are the base images upon which Vagrant environments are built.
Boxes are an optimization so that Vagrant doesn’t have to install a complete operating system on every vagrant up. Installing an operating system from scratch generally takes up to 30 minutes on a good computer.
$ vagrant box list
$ vagrant box remove precise64 virtualbox
