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Created November 30, 2017 20:49
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vagrant.md

1. Introduction and Installation

  • VirtualBox, is free, available on every major platform, and built-in to Vagrant. Vagrant can work with many other providers.

  • Some operating system distributions include a vagrant package in their upstream package repos. Please do not install Vagrant in this manner.

Verify installation -

vagrant

2. Project Setup

Vagrant has a built-in command for initializing a directory for usage with Vagrant.

$ mkdir myvm
$ cd myvm
$ vagrant init
  • This will place a Vagrantfile in your current directory. You can take a look at the Vagrantfile if you want.
  • The Vagrantfile is meant to be committed to version control with your project, if you use version control.
  • Instead of building a virtual machine from scratch, which would be a slow and tedious process, Vagrant uses a base image to quickly clone a virtual machine. These base images are known as "boxes" in Vagrant.

Boxes are added to Vagrant with vagrant box add. Find base boxes - https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search

$ vagrant box add ubuntu/trusty64
  • You can also add boxes from a local file, custom URL, etc.
  • Boxes are globally stored for the current user. Each project uses a box as an initial image to clone from, and never modifies the actual base image.
  • If the box was not added before, Vagrant will automatically download and add the box when it is run.
vagrant box list

Open the Vagrantfile and change the contents to the following:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
end
  • You may specify an explicit version of a box by specifying config.vm.box_version for example -
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.box_version = "20171115.1.2"
end

The "2" in Vagrant.configure configures the configuration version

More boxes - https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search

  • HashiCorp's Vagrant Cloud lets you host your own boxes, as well as private boxes if you intend on creating boxes for your own organization.

3. Up & Running

$ vagrant up
  • You can check Virtualbox to verify

You can SSH into the machine -

$ vagrant ssh

Check VM’s health -

uname -a
df -h
free -m

Change RAM of the VM with provider specific configuration -

…
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
        vb.memory = "1024"
  end
…
vagrant reload —provision
vagrant ssh

Check free -m now

Be careful about rm -rf /, since Vagrant shares a directory at /vagrant with the directory on the host containing your Vagrantfile, and this can delete all those files.

The SSH session can be terminated with CTRL+D

vagrant@precise64:~$ logout

Suspending the virtual machine by calling vagrant suspend will save the current running state of the machine and stop it.

Halting the virtual machine by calling vagrant halt will gracefully shut down the guest operating system and power down the guest machine. You can use vagrant up when you are ready to boot it again.

vagrant halt

4. Folder Synchronisation

  • Not many people want to edit files using just plain terminal-based editors over SSH. y using synced folders, Vagrant will automatically sync your files to and from the guest machine.

  • By default, Vagrant shares your project directory (remember, that is the one with the Vagrantfile) to the /vagrant directory in your guest machine.

  • Note that when you vagrant ssh into your machine, you're in /home/vagrant. /home/vagrant is a different directory from the synced /vagrant directory.

Up Again -

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
vagrant@precise64:~$ ls /vagrant

That Vagrantfile you see inside the virtual machine is actually the same Vagrantfile that is on your actual host machine.

vagrant@precise64:~$ touch /vagrant/foo
vagrant@precise64:~$ exit
$ ls

Point to custom folder -

config.vm.synced_folder "~/Documents/Code”, “/vagrant”

5. Provisioning

Alright, so we have a virtual machine running a basic copy of Ubuntu and we can edit files from our machine and have them synced into the virtual machine. Let us now serve those files using a webserver.

We could just SSH in and install a webserver and be on our way, but then every person who used Vagrant would have to do the same thing. Instead, Vagrant has built-in support for automated provisioning. Using this feature, Vagrant will automatically install software when you vagrant up so that the guest machine can be repeatably created and ready-to-use.

We will just setup Apache for our basic project, and we will do so using a shell script. Create the following shell script and save it as bootstrap.sh in the same directory as your Vagrantfile:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

apt-get update
apt-get install -y apache2

ln -fs /vagrant /var/www/html

Next, we configure Vagrant to run this shell script when setting up our machine. We do this by editing the Vagrantfile -

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.provision :shell, path: "bootstrap.sh"
end

The "provision" line is new, and tells Vagrant to use the shell provisioner to setup the machine, with the bootstrap.sh file.

After everything is configured, just run vagrant up to create your machine and Vagrant will automatically provision it.

If the guest machine is already running from a previous step, run vagrant reload --provision

After Vagrant completes running, the web server will be up and running. You cannot see the website from your own browser (yet), but you can verify that the provisioning works by loading a file from SSH within the machine:

$ vagrant ssh
...
vagrant@precise64:~$ wget -qO- 127.0.0.1

It may be more efficient to package a custom Vagrant box with those packages pre-installed instead of building them each time.

6. Networking & Sharing

In this step, we will use Vagrant's networking features to give us additional options for accessing the machine from our host machine.

Port Forwarding
This allows you to access a port on your own machine, but actually have all the network traffic forwarded to a specific port on the guest machine. Let us setup a forwarded port so we can access Apache in our guest.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.	 :shell, path: "bootstrap.sh"
  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 4567
end

Run a vagrant reload —provision

Once the machine is running again, load http://127.0.0.1:4567

Private Network

config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.10"

Sharing
Vagrant Share lets you share your Vagrant environment to anyone around the world with an Internet connection. Download and install ngrok

$ vagrant share

To end the sharing session, hit Ctrl+C in your terminal

7. Teardown & Rebuild

Destroying the virtual machine by calling vagrant destroy will remove all traces of the guest machine from your system. It'll stop the guest machine, power it down, and remove all of the guest hard disks.

vagrant destroy
  • The vagrant destroy command does not actually remove the downloaded box file. To completely remove the box file, you can use the vagrant box remove command.

When you are ready to come back to your project, whether it is tomorrow, a week from now, or a year from now, getting it up and running is easy:

vagrant up

Providers
Vagrant can work with a wide variety of backend providers, such as VMware, AWS, and more. Once you have a provider installed, you do not need to make any modifications to your Vagrantfile, just vagrant up with the proper provider and Vagrant will do the rest:

vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusion
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