Vagrant

Vagrant is used to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable (Linux, Mac OS X or Windows) development environments

Setup

A Vagrantfile is used to describe your project's environment, specifically:

Software installation can be deferred to provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet.

To create a new Vagrantfile, run:

vagrant init

Vagrant uses as a box (base image) to clone a virtual machine.

So, the first step is to add a box from the Vagrant Cloud:

vagrant box add chef/ubuntu-13.10

Inside your Vagrantfile, reference this box:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
	config.vm.box = "chef/ubuntu-13.10"
end

Verify

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Vagrant has built in provisioning via the shell provisioner.

First create a public directory to house our web files:

mkdir public
echo "HI" > public/index.html

Simply create a bootstrap.sh file at the root of our project:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

apt-get update
apt-get install -y apache2
rm -rf /var/www
ln -fs /vagrant/public /var/www

Add this script reference to our Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
	config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "bootstrap.sh"
end

Then reload and run the provisoner

vagrant reload --provision

Verify

vagrant ssh
wget -qO- 127.0.0.1

Vagrant supports port forwarding, public and private networks

To setup port forwarding for our apache server simply:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
	config.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 4567, guest: 80
end

Then reload

vagrant reload

Verify

http://localhost:4567

Vagrant supports a number of teardown options: