What is Vagrant? Vagrant is a simple and easy to use tool that makes it really easy to manage virtual machines from the command-line interface.
Vagrant out of the box supports VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Docker and has the ability to manage other types of machines, like VMWare or Amazon EC2, by using other providers.
In this tutorial i will show how to initialize a new Vagrant environment, download, provision and start a virtual machine, how to SSH into it and how to stop or destroy it after.
This tutorial supposes that you have already installed one of supported virtual providers, like VirtualBox or Docker.
Cool Tip: Install Docker on Ubuntu-16.04 or Ubuntu-18.04 and use it with Vagrant!
Install Vagrant
Download and install the latest version of Vagrant package from the official download page.
Print the Vagrant’s version to make sure that you have successfully installed it:
$ vagrant -v Vagrant 2.0.0
Vagrant Boxes
Standard templates of the virtual machines in Vagrant are called boxes.
You can find a public list of Vagrant boxes on the box search page.
VirtualBox ≠ VMWare: Vagrant boxes are all provider-specific. Not all boxes are available for all providers. You may need to sort by a provider that you have on your local system to narrow down your search.
Once you find a box you want to use – create a directory where you will store your new project:
$ mkdir -p vagrant-projects/tutorial $ cd vagrant-projects/tutorial
Initializes a new Vagrant environment inside the project’s directory by typing vagrant init <boxpath>, where <boxpath> is the name of Vagrant box.
For example, to use the base image of Ubuntu-16.04, type:
$ vagrant init ubuntu/xenial64
The vagrant init command creates a Vagrantfile in the current directory, that describes the type of machine required for a project and how to configure and provision this machine.
Vagrant Up
Start Vagrant environment:
$ vagrant up
The vagrant up command creates, configures and starts a virtual machine according to your Vagrantfile.
On the first run it automatically downloads the required Vagrant box from the box repository and performs provisioning.
Cool Tip: Every DevOps engineer should know the basic Git workflow! It is really simple and you can learn it right now! Read more →
Vagrant SSH
SSH into a running Vagrant machine and access the shell:
$ vagrant ssh
Clean Up Vagrant
If you need to suspend the development process – you can either stop the Vagrant machine or just suspend it.
Stop Vagrant machine:
$ vagrant halt
Suspend a machine (remember the state):
$ vagrant suspend
To clean up the development environment – you can destroy the machine.
Stop and delete all traces of the Vagrant machine:
$ vagrant destroy
When you need again a clear Vagrant environment based on a standard template – just run vagrant up.