Vagrant provides a configurable, reproducible and portable development environtment. It automatically creates the environtment. That environtment will be distributable between other team members and platforms. This action avoids different work environtments for each developer. It works through virtual machines from several providers (VirtualBox, VMWare…). To configure those virtual machines in other environtments you can use tools like Chef, Puppet, etc.
Vagrant links files located inside the working path with the development environtment file system. This method allows developers to work with the environtment in an isolated way.
To download Vagrant you should go to: http://www.vagrantup.com/
You can find Vagrant documentation in: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/
The first step you should do before start working with Vagrant projects is go to the specific working path. Then, to create an environtment, you execute:
$ vagrant init
It creates a Vagrantfile which is writen using Ruby syntax and is a definition for Vagrant to set up the environtment.
After configuring the project (adding one or several boxes, and setting up several options (instructions are below)) you will start working on it using:
$ vagrant up
It creates the environtment from scratch, even if it is new or you previously destroyed it. This command also brings the environtment back after suspend it or halt it.
You can change the provider to start the envorintment with using the parameter –provider:
$ vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusion $ vagrant up --provider=aws
You can access to the virtual machine through an ssh session using:
$ vagrant ssh
You can destroy an environtment using the command:
$ vagrant destroy
Differences between destroy, halt or suspend an environtment can be found at: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/getting-started/teardown.html
Boxes are virtual machine images previously configured to start working with them. To add a Box into the project you will execute:
$ vagrant box add <name>
Being <name> the specific identifier for the image. Identifiers can be image names in Vagrant Cloud, URLs, local files… Vagrant Cloud (https://vagrantcloud.com/) is a web page were you can find great variety of free boxes.
To configure the Vagrant project and environment it's needed to edit the Vangrantfile created into the working directory. If configuration changes affected the initial installation it would be required to reload the project with:
$ vagrant reload
Configuration lines are contained in Vagrantfile using the next format:
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
<configuration lines>
end
To define the box that Vagrant will use we will add the next line (for example, using hashicorp/precise32):
config.vm.box = “hashicorp/precise32”
To define a file script (for example bootstrap.sh) which will install the required software to develop:
config.vm.provision :shell, :path ⇒ “bootstrap.sh”
To make available the access of a localhost port number inside the Vagrant environtment (for example, to access to the Vagrant environment through port 4567 using http://127.0.0.1:80):
config.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 4567, guest: 80