Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool to automate the process of provisioning virtual machines (VMs). It was initially developed by Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of Hashicorp as a personal side project back in 2010.

# Providers

Providers are the virtualization technology that Vagrant can to deploy and configure VM natively.

Here is a list of supported Vagrant providers.

• Virtualbox
• Docker
• EC2
• OpenStack
• DigitalOcean
• Azure
• Google
• VMWare
• Hyper-V
• Vultr
• Qemu

# Box

Box are essentially images of the VM that can be deployed. Vagrant have its own repository that contains a wide array of boxes created by officials or the community that can be used for deployment.

Boxes can be discovered/browsed through the Hashicorp Portal.

Some of the example boxes are

• centos/7
• generic/gentoo
• ubuntu/xenial64
• hashicorp/precise64
• archlinux/archlinux

# Vagrantfile

Vagrantfile is the file that contains all configurations for a VM that Vagrant uses for deployment. The file is written in Ruby syntax.

This is the bare minimum Vagrantfile that specifies centos/7 to be used as the image for creating the VM.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/7"
end

Using vagrant init centos/7 will scaffold a heavily commented Vagrantfile for CentOS that it helpful for beginners to go through. Here are more examples for how a Vagrantfile can be configured.

To validate a Vagrantfile, run the validate command.

vagrant validate

# Provisioner

Provisioner is the medium that sets up the VM after they have been created. It wouldn't be that useful to create an empty VM without the necessary tools and software installed.

• Ansible
• Puppet
• Chef
• Salt
• Raw scripts (e.g Bash)

# Shell Scripts

In the shell provisioning block, we can provide inline shell commands that will be executed upon creation/edit.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/7"
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
    echo hello from shell!
    sudo yum update -y
    sudo yum install -y httpd
  SHELL
end

Alternatively, we can have a separate shell script that can be referenced in the Vagrantfile to achieve the same thing.

#!/bin/bash

echo hello from shell!
sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y httpd

The provision.sh script can be referenced as such:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/7"
  config.vm.provision "shell", path: "provision.sh"
end

More details about using shell as the provisioner can be found on the official documentation.

# Next Steps

After having the Vagrantfile generated and configured, run vagrant up to start the VM. For first time execution, it will download the box specified (image) from the official repository first before creating and running the VM.

When the VM have been created and running, run vagrant ssh to ssh into the VM. To quit the VM from the SSH, type exit in the command line. To stop the VM, run vagrant halt to gracefully shutdown the VM.

# Basic Commands

This section shows a few common commands of the Vagrant CLI.

# Vagrant Commands

# Vagrant Box Commands

# VirtualBox as Provider

When using VirtualBox as a provider for Vagrant, this are some useful commands for inspecting the VMs.

• List all the VMs

vboxmanage list vms

• List all the running VMs

vboxmanage list runningvms

# References