Vagrant

Vagrant

About Vagrant

HashiCorp's Vagrant is software that can automatically provision virtual machines to various providers. If your workstation or laptop has Oracle's VirtualBox (the most common choice for Vagrant) or VMWare installed, Vagrant can provision virtual machines locally.

This makes it very easy to generate reproducible virtual machines for testing and development and then tear them down again when they are not needed. In many cases this is preferable to installing the software being tested directly on the workstation or laptop, which can sometimes be difficult to fully and cleanly remove. This makes Vagrant a valuable tool for TDs, developers, and administrators.

If you are not already familiar with Vagrant, it is strongly recommended that you work through the Getting Started tutorial on the Vagrant site. It only takes a short time, and it will introduce you to the key concepts of Vagrant.

Vagrant Quick Tips

1. Vagrant is primarily used for development, testing, and learning. As such, Vagrant virtual machines often have minimal or no security and should not be used in production unless specifically built and tested for production use.

2. Virtual machines created by Vagrant should always be started by navigating to the folder containing the Vagrantfile and then using the vagrant up command. This ensures things such as network configuration and folders shared with the host machine (meaning your workstation or laptop) are properly configured.

3. If the virtual machine that is being provisioned uses a base box that has not been previously downloaded, Vagrant will automatically download the base box and import it. This step generally only needs to be done once. Be aware that base boxes can be large and take a while to download depending on the speed of your internet connection.

4. For virtual machines that show a desktop interface, it's possible that the interface will appear before the provisioning script has completed. Be sure to allow the provisioning script to fully complete before interacting with the virtual machine.

5. If you no longer need the virtual machine, or wish to re-provision it from scratch for a clean start, use the vagrant destroy command. This will remove the virtual machine but will not remove the base box on which it is based. This is a good thing, since it means the base box will not need to be re-downloaded the next time you provision the virtual machine.