Vagrant is a program that enables you to create portable and reproducible development environments easily supporting many hosts and guests operating systems and various features such as synced folders, forwarded ports and support for famous provisioners such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible.
If you have been using tools like Virtual Box you may think of it such as a scripting engine for VirtualBox. What are the use cases for Vagrant over Virtual Box ?
1) Network
You need to set up quickly multi networks. Vagrant gives you a single config file to set these up, enabling you to launch all of them with one command. Simply edit the Vagrantfile and reload the VMs, whereas with VirtualBox you’d have to open the settings for each VM, and change them inside.
2) Multi platform
There’s a large number of boxes available at sites such as http://vagrantbox.es. This enables you to try various OSes or distributions, applying the same provisioning to set up similar environments. This can help with testing or adding support to new platforms, and would be time-consuming using just VirtualBox.
3) Shareable configuration files
The configuration is stored in a text file called Vagrantfile which can be easily versioned and shared. So in case you had problems with your image just revert the changes and reload the VM!
Hello World Vagrant
Vagrant uses boxes – essentially virtual machines pre-configured with software – as the starting unit of any configuration. You can find a ton of existing boxes at atlas.hashicorp.com – if one suits your needs exactly, you can use it directly. If it’s close, you can create a new one based on it. You can also build your own boxes from scratch using Virtualbox.
To install plain Vagrant package, run:
$ yum install vagrant
This will install base Vagrant package which is what you want in case you only need to use Vagrant with Docker or provider that is currently not directly supported in Fedora such as VirtualBox. Next, try the vagrant command from your OS prompt. You should get something looking like this:
$ vagrant
Usage: vagrant [options] <command> [<args>]
-v, --version Print the version and exit.
-h, --help Print this help.
Common commands:
box manages boxes: installation, removal, etc.
destroy stops and deletes all traces of the vagrant machine
global-status outputs status Vagrant environments for this user
halt stops the vagrant machine
help shows the help for a subcommand
init initializes a new Vagrant environment by creating a Vagrantfile
login log in to HashiCorp's Atlas
package packages a running vagrant environment into a box
plugin manages plugins: install, uninstall, update, etc.
provision provisions the vagrant machine
push deploys code in this environment to a configured destination
rdp connects to machine via RDP
reload restarts vagrant machine, loads new Vagrantfile configuration
resume resume a suspended vagrant machine
ssh connects to machine via SSH
ssh-config outputs OpenSSH valid configuration to connect to the machine
status outputs status of the vagrant machine
suspend suspends the machine
up starts and provisions the vagrant environment
version prints current and latest Vagrant version
For help on any individual command run `vagrant COMMAND -h`
Now you’re ready to try configuring a virtual machine. Every Vagrant development environment requires a box. You can search for boxes at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/search. We will use the fedora/23-cloud-base box so enter:
$ vagrant init fedora/23-cloud-base
You will see a Vagrantfile has been created for you. The primary function of the Vagrantfile is to describe the type of machine required for a project, and how to configure and provision these machines. The syntax of Vagrantfiles is Ruby, but knowledge of the Ruby programming language is not necessary to make modifications to the Vagrantfile, since it is mostly simple variable assignment.
# All Vagrant configuration is done below. The "2" in Vagrant.configure # configures the configuration version (we support older styles for # backwards compatibility). Please don't change it unless you know what # you're doing. Vagrant.configure(2) do |config| config.vm.box = "fedora/23-cloud-base" end
Now, let’s boot the server:
$ vagrant up
Vagrant spins up a virtual machine using the selected box image. You can choose the VM provider for starting the VM. The default is virtualbox if you leave the –provider flag out of your vagrant up command.
You can check the status of the VM with:
$ vagrant status Current machine states: default running (libvirt)
Once the machine is up and running, you can connect to it as the vagrant user:
$ vagrant ssh
The Vagrant user you’ll connect to is usually named vagrant with a password of vagrant, but that isn’t actually required. In fact, Vagrant creates and signs special SSH keys between your host machine and the box, so that you don’t have to enter passwords to work in the command line. Your user traditionally is granted sudo rights, so a simple su – is all you need to get in as Root.
Once in the VM shell, you can check the IP address assigned to the VM:
$ ifconfig
eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.121.192 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.121.255
inet6 fe80::5054:ff:fe82:93f prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether 52:54:00:82:09:3f txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 1203 bytes 92341 (90.1 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 2 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 355 bytes 49444 (48.2 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
Once completed, return to the host and stop the VM with:
$ vagrant halt
