Chapter -3 | About Vagrant Installation and Setup & Vagrant Cheat Sheet

What is Vagrant?

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. It makes life easier by lowering development environment setup time and increasing productivity.

Vagrant is the command line utility for managing the virtual machines. The following image shows the overview of vagrant.

Now let us understand this using a diagram

Managing various VM and configuring it is quite tedious. So using vagrant we can able to manage, configure and run multiple VM using a file known as “Vagrant File”.

A Vagrant file can keep the configuration of the VM such as OS, RAM, storage, and so on. when we run vagrant up command in a terminal, vagrant reads through the vagrant file and starts executing and creating VM according to the configuration.

Features of Vagrant

Vagrantfile:

• A Vagrantfile is a configuration file for controlling virtual machine.
• It uses simple ruby syntax Refer here
• It contains all the necessary information needed for other user who wants to recreate the same VM.
• If the user needs to recreate the virtual machine created, then only Vagrantfile is shared

Boxes

• Boxes are the package format for Vagrant
• Boxes can be easily downloaded by using vagrant box add command
• Publicly available boxes are shared here.
• Every Box is restricted to run on supported providers. So while choosing the box checkwhether it matches your Provider(VirtualBox/Hyper-V/VmWare)

Networking

Vagrant supports 3 main types of networking

1. Public Networking
2. Private Networking

3. Port - Forwarding

4. Port-forwarding is the action of linking a port on your host machine to a port on the guest machine. Refer Link

5. Private Networking allows the virtual machine to be accessed via private address. Refer Link
6. Public Networking attempts to allow public access from outside your host machine (if your provider and machine will allow it) instead of just allowing access from inside the host machine. Refer Link

Provisioning

• Provisioning offers you the way to configure the virtual machine by executing Scripts or configurations. Refer here Provisioning happens in the following cases
• Executing vagrant up command for the first time
• Executing vagrant provision command
• Executing vagrant reload --provision command

Plugins

• To change the way Vagrant does something or add additional functionality to Vagrant. this can be done via Vagrant plugins.

Creating a VM

• vagrant init Initialize Vagrant with a Vagrantfile and ./.vagrant directory, using no specified base image. Before you can do vagrant up, you'll need to specify a base image in the Vagrantfile.
• vagrant init <boxpath> Initialize Vagrant with a specific box.

Starting a VM

• vagrant up starts vagrant environment (also provisions only on the FIRST vagrant up)
• vagrant resume resume a suspended machine (vagrant up works just fine for this as well)
• vagrant provision forces reprovisioning of the vagrant machine
• vagrant reload restarts vagrant machine, loads new Vagrantfile configuration
• vagrant reload provision restart the virtual machine and force provisioning

Getting into a VM

• vagrant ssh connects to machine via SSH
• vagrant ssh <boxname> If you give your box a name in your Vagrantfile, you can ssh into it with boxname. Works from any directory.

Stopping a VM

• vagrant halt stops the vagrant machine
• vagrant suspend suspends a virtual machine (remembers state)

Cleaning up a VM

• vagrant destroy stops and deletes all traces of the vagrant machine
• vagrant destroy -f same as above, without confirmation

Boxes

• vagrant box list see a list of all installed boxes on your computer
• vagrant box add <name> <url> download a box image to your computer
• vagrant box outdated check for updates vagrant box update
• vagrant box remove <name> deletes a box from the machine
• vagrant package packages a running virtualbox env in a reusable box

Saving Progress

• vagrant snapshot save [options] [vm-name] <name> vm-name is often default. Allows us to save so that we can rollback at a later time

Tips

• vagrant -v get the vagrant version
• vagrant status outputs status of the vagrant machine
• vagrant global-status outputs status of all vagrant machines
• vagrant global-status --prune same as above, but prunes invalid entries
• vagrant provision --debug use the debug flag to increase the verbosity of the output
• vagrant push yes, vagrant can be configured to deploy code!
• vagrant up --provision | tee provision.log Runs vagrant up, forces provisioning and logs all output to a file

Plugins

vagrant-hostsupdater : $ vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater to update your/etc/hosts file automatically each time you start/stop your vagrant box.