Vagrant Basics

Vagrant

A tool to manage virtual machines. Its used to creating reproducible working environments for testing and development

Virtual Machine

Virtual machine is software for emulation of a computer system.

• There are chiefly 2 categories of virtual machines, System or Process
• Today we are concerned with System Virtual Machine
  • A system virtual machine can emulate hardware of a physical computer
  • They are used for isolating working/execution environments. This strategy is used to provide service in cloud.
  • Its also useful for testing for systems/architecture for which you don't have physical hardware.

Popular Virtual Machine software

• VirtualBox
• KVM
• xen
• VMware

Demo

Setting up vagrant on mac

            brew tap caskroom/cask
            brew cask install virtualbox
            brew cask install vagrant

Adding a vagrant box

Boxes are the package format for Vagrant environments. A box can be used by anyone on any platform that Vagrant supports to bring up an identical working environment.

• Copy the "ubuntu_12.04_java7.box" file from bagoba to your home folder

• Add the copied image to vagrant using following command

  vagrant box add ubuntu-12.04 ubuntu_12.04_java7.box
  

Initialize Vagrant box

• Create a folder for your development environment

  mkdir testvagrant
  cd testvagrant
  

• Initialize Vagrant with the box you just imported

  vagrant init ubuntu-12.04
  

• Notice that there is a `Vagrantfile` in your dir now. Open it in your text editor

Start vagrant machine

• Start vm with:

  vagrant up
  

• SSH into your vagrant machine:

  vagrant ssh
  

Sharing Files with Vagrant

• By default, vagrant mounts the directory you spawn your machine from at /vagrant inside the vm
• One advantage of sharing files like this is that you can use your favorite tools to code and then execute it from within VM

Provisioning on your vagrant machine

• Add these lines in your Vagrantfile. Uncomment if they are already present:

  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <-SHELL
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install -y apache2
  SHELL
  

• Provision your vagrant machine:

  vagrant provision
  

Configure your vagrant machine with a accessible private static ip

• Provision your vagrant machine:

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

• Restart vagrant using:

  vagrant reload
  

Suspend, Stopping and destroying vagrant machine

• Suspend your vagrant machine:

  vagrant suspend
  

• Stop your vagrant machine:

  vagrant halt
  

• Destroy your vagrant machine:

  vagrant destroy
  

Vagrant plug-ins

Vagrant's functions can be extended via plugins. Lots of amazing plug-ins available via community. Some Useful plugins:

• vagrant-cachier: helps with fetching packages again and again using a NFS cache volume
• vagrant-scp: copy files in vagrant using scp