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Unidata Vagrant Tutorial Materials

Overview

Vagrant is a developer-centric tool for managing and distributing VM environments between developers and/or users. I believe that it can be very useful to us as an organization, as both a development tool and a distribution pipeline for pre-configured virtual environments for our community.

The bottom line:

Vagrant/VagrantCloud is essentially git/github for Virtual Machine images.

Requirements

In order to work through this tutorial, the following is needed:

Note: A VagrantCloud account is not necessary for this tutorial, but it is free, and advanced sharing functions require it.

Note: This tutorial requires VirtualBox 4.3.10, as well as the VirtualBox 4.3.10 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack download.

Any and all commands used in this tutorial and/or examples will assume you are in this top-level vagrant-tutorial/ directory.

Getting Started

Vagrant is primarily a developer tool, and is designed to be configured on a per-project basis. The configuration file, Vagrantfile, contains definitions of the VM's associated with the project.

The host operating system, referred to as host from here on out, can be Windows, OSX, or Linux; any platforms supported by VirtualBox and Vagrant will do. The commands in this tutorial will assume a linux or OSX command line.

Examining Vagrant Configuration

You can view the defined VM configurations for this project with the following command:

$ vagrant status

This will list the following VM configurations:

  • ubuntu_plain: A base ubuntu 12.04 64-bit system.
  • ubuntu_developer: A base ubuntu 12.04 64-bit system, plus ubuntu developer tools.
  • ubuntu_webserver: A base ubuntu 12.04 64-bit system with a running web server.

If you examine the Vagrantfile configuration, you will see that all systems inherit from the hashicorp/precise64 box. This identifier is mapped through the Vagrant service to a VM image hosted on some remote server. hashicorp/precise64 is a 64-bit 12.04 Ubuntu system, provided by the Vagrant development team. Other publicly available boxes may be found at https://vagrantcloud.com/discover/featured.

The first time you use Vagrant to bring up a VM image, it will look to see if a local version of hashicorp/precise64 exists. If it does not, it will go out and fetch it. You can also download and view it ahead of time with the following commands:

$ vagrant box add hashicorp/precise64
$ vagrant box list

Using Vagrant to build a plain VM

Here is how you can create a basic VM with vagrant.

$ vagrant up ubuntu_plain

You will be able to watch vagrant create and boot the VM image. Once it has been created and is running, consider the following commands:

Note: ubuntu_plain is the default configuration, so you will not need to specify a configuration name when using the following commands. For other configurations, however, you will need to specify which VM instance you want to connect to, halt, destroy, etc.

  • vagrant status: View the status of the VM's associated with the project.
  • vagrant ssh: SSH into the VM instance.
  • vagrant halt: Halt the VM instance.
  • vagrant suspend: Suspend the VM instance.
  • vagrant destroy: Completely destroy the VM instance.

Using Vagrant to build a developer VM

Next, lets look at using Vagrant to create a development environment within a VM. We'll use the ubuntu_developer configuration. Bring it up as follows:

$ vagrant up ubuntu_developer

You can then watch vagrant create and boot the VM image, and then install the developer tools. You will then be able to use the same commands to interact with the VM.

Wait a moment! Don't ubuntu_plain and ubuntu_developer both use the same vagrant box, hashicorp/precise64?

Yes, they do! The developer tools are installed when the VM is provisioned. In this case, vagrant is running the bash script "provision_scripts/bootstrap_script.sh" after bringing up the VM. This script is run as the root user.

Using Vagrant to build a web server VM

The final example shows how a basic Vagrant networking example. We'll use the ubuntu_webserver configuration.

$ vagrant up ubuntu_webserver

This time, vagrant will use the provision_scripts/bootstrap_web.sh bash script to provision the server. This script:

  • Installs apache2, other tools.
  • Renders this README.md markdown file into an html document, index.html
  • Removes the default index.html in /var/www/ on the web server.
  • Uses the html version of this markdown file as the new default website.

Once the VM is booted, you can view the default apache install by opening a web browser and pointing it at http://localhost:8080. This port forwarding is enabled in the configuration file, and may use arbitrary ports. Note, Vagrant is smart about port collision and will do its best to prevent it.

Summary

This tutorial barely scratches the surface of Vagrant. Additional information may be found at the following sites: