Vagrant Up

Daniel Messenger

Overview

• A bit of background
• What is Vagrant?
• Why use Vagrant?
• Workflow
• Plugins
• Who uses Vagrant?
• Resources

Background

• Started January 2010 by Mitchell Hashimoto
• Remained a side project for 3 years
• November 2012 Mitchell formed Hashicorp
• Started as open source and will always remain open source

What is Vagrant?

Vagrant is a platform that sits on top of virtualisation software to provide automation of creating and provisioning virtual machine (VM) environments

WTF does that mean!?

• Host machine and VM provider for guest machines
• Typically start with an ISO image (Ubuntu, Fedora, Windows)
• Use VM provider to install the OS and set up networking, folder shares, hardware (CPU, Memory allocation), I/O devices etc...
• Start the box, hope everything works and install dependencies
• Vagrant removes these manual steps and provides automation using a Vagrantfile
• Vagrantfile is portable!

VM Providers

Vagrantfile

    
        # -*- mode: ruby -*-
        # vi: set ft=ruby :

        Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

            config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"

            config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080

            config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.10"

            config.vm.synced_folder "/path/on/host/web_root", "/web_root"

            config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
               # Display the VirtualBox GUI when booting the machine
               vb.gui = true

               # Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
               vb.memory = "1024"
             end

            config.vm.provision "file", source: "./install_mysql.sh", destination: "~/install_mysql.sh"

        end
    

Why use Vagrant?

• Consistent environment - avoids "works on my machine" bugs
• Isolates dependencies and their configuration
• Portable
• Works on Windows, Linux and OSX
• Removes manual creation and provision process of VMs
• Easily spin up more VMs with a different environment to test against i.e. php53 to php56, apache to nginx

Workflow

One time run on the command line to initialise the box

• vagrant box add {title} {url}
• vagrant init {title}

Now the box has been downloaded and a Vagrantfile is present

• Clone repo to the host machine
• vagrant up
• Make changes and test
• Commit/push changes
• vagrant destroy

Plugins

• Vagrant has lots of plugins that can extend its functionality
• Plugins can be installed via `vagrant plugin install {name}`
• A really useful plugin is vagrant-vbguest

Note: Guest additions are designed to be installed on the guest OS to provide device drivers and system applications that improve the guest OS performance

Who uses Vagrant?

PHPStorm Integration

oh-my-zsh Integration

Resources

• Vagrant Docs - https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/
• Vagrant Cloud - https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search
• Plugins - https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/wiki/Available-Vagrant-Plugins
• Vagrant Boxes - http://www.vagrantbox.es

Thanks