Vagrant

Vagrant is a powerful tool to easily manage and configure VMs. This page will serve as a simple, bare-bones guide to introduce you to Vagrant. If you want to learn more, check out Vagrant’s documentation

Getting started

Imagine you had a group of developers that all needed the same development environment that relied on many different tools and each tool had specific version requirements. Vagrant would allow you to pre-configure this environment and then distribute it amongst the team. That way everyone has the same set of tools at their repsective versions. The statement, “It works on my machine” when troubleshooting functionality has become a relic.

This is the magic of Vagrant. It enables reproducable environments on whatever OS you need to work in for prototyping. When done with the environment or Vagrant “box”, throw it away.

“Box” is the term Vagrant uses to describe it’s preconfigured VM’s. The creators of Vagrant, HashiCorp, have a number of official and approved boxes.

Bento has a popular bunch of boxes. They have many different operating systems that can be deployed easily with Vagrant.

VM creation and booting

To spin up a VM with Vagrant, use the vagrant init command like so:

vagrant init bento/freebsd-11

This command will initialize a Vagrantfile file in the current directory. This file serves as the configuration for the virtual machine. In depth configuration can be found in Vagrant’s documentation. In this case, we are setting up a VM running FreeBSD 11.

A Vagrant file may look as simple as this:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "bento/freebsd-11.2"
end

This file tells Vagrant to reach out to Bento and create their FreeBSD 11.2 Box locally on your system as a console-based virtual machine.

After we have a Vagrantfile, we are one step away from running our VM!

vagrant up

With this simple command, Vagrant reads the Vagrantfile to figure out which box you are using, downloads it, and boots it up!

VM management

There will come a time where you no longer want the VM running. To shutdown the VM, run the following from the directory with your Vagrantfile:

vagrant halt

This will gracefully shutdown your VM.

If the virtual machine you have been using just isn’t needed anymore, there’s good news! Vagrant has a command to delete VMs too:

vagrant destroy

Again, from the directory containing your Vagrantfile, run the destroy command and it will walk you through a confirmation before removing the associated virtual machine and vagrant files.

VM interaction

Now that we have a VM vagrant up and running, we can interact with it!

The simplest way to connect to and interact with your VM is to use the following command:

vagrant ssh

If you are in a directory with a Vagrantfile and that virtual machine is running, you can ssh to it with the vagrant ssh command.

After you have ssh’d into the virtual machine, you are free to do whatever it is you need to do! You have complete and total control over this virtualized environment!

Need to use Vagrant for Docker? Click here