Developing software as part of a team can sometimes be a pain, especially when the setup required to get that software to a working state is not trivial. Setting up dependencies, the state of the environment the application needs to run in and, worst of all, ensuring this configuration works just the same for everyone in your team, can feel like a fool's errand.
Things can get very cumbersome too when you're experimenting with a fiddly application that references conficting versions of libraries that may have to be installed in your machine. Installing the wrong version or doing so in the wrong place can swiftly unleash a world of pain that will sour your day or even your entire week.
Wouldn't it be great if, at times like this, we could just throw everything away and start afresh? What's more, wouldn't it be beyond awesome that, once we had everything up and running smoothly, we could easily share it with everybody else in our team so they don't have to go through the same excruciating pain as we did to get going, no matter the operating system or specific config they use in their dev computers?
No need to wonder, as today I intend to show you in just 5 minutes how you can realise this dream with Vagrant. Ok, ready? Go! ⏱
is a tool that allows you to capture the configuration of a development environment and apply this configuration to a virtual machine on which you will run the applications you're developing. Since the setup of the VM is concisely described in a config file, you can be sure the same Vagrant box configuration will give you and your fellow devs the same environment to work on, irrespective of operating system or system configuration.
For this tutorial, we are going to spin up a Ubuntu VM running an Apache web server and we will make the web server available from the host.
To follow this tutorial you will need the following software installed in your machine:
the version of Vagrant appropriate for your operating system.
Create a directory for the Vagrant box that we will be configuring.
$ mkdir ./vagrant $ cd ./vagrant
Create a file named `Vagrantfile` in this directory with the following contents:
# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.define "ubuntu" do |ubuntu|
ubuntu.vm.box = "ubuntu/xenial64"
ubuntu.vm.hostname = "ubuntu"
ubuntu.vm.network :private_network, type: "dhcp"
ubuntu.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 8080, auto_correct: true
ubuntu.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 1024]
vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--cpus", 1]
vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "on"]
vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--ioapic", "on"]
end
ubuntu.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
ansible.playbook = "setup.yml"
end
end
end
This will give us a barebones VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS. If we wish to install software onto it, like Apache, and run in additional box configuration steps when creating it, we need to write a separate file in the directory, called `setup.yml`, which is referenced from the Vagrantfile and will drive the box provisioning stage.
Copy this into `setup.yml`:
{% raw %}
---
- hosts: ubuntu
vars:
ansible_python_interpreter: "/usr/bin/python3"
remote_user: vagrant
become: true
tasks:
- name: install packages
apt: pkg={{item}} state=latest
update_cache: yes
with_items:
- apache2
{% endraw %}
Your `vagrant` directory should now contain a `Vagrantfile` to specify the configuration of your Ubuntu VM and a `setup.yml` Ansible playbook to provision it.
Run this command in the directory where your Vagrantfile is located to launch the VM:
$ vagrant up
This will take a few minutes, as Vagrant has to download the Ubuntu ISO, load it into a new VirtualBox VM, configure and launch it. Once it's done, navigate to the following URL in your browser:
http://localhost:8080/
If you can see the Apache server test page, the VM was successfully launched.
You can now access your VM by running the `vagrant ssh` command if you want to do further work on it.
When you get bored of it, just power it off with `vagrant halt` or destroy it completely with `vagrant destroy`. You can also take snapshots of the current running state of your VM with `vagrant snapshot save <snapshot_name>` and restore them with `vagrant snapshot restore <snapshot_name>`.
Here's a cheatsheet of the essential Vagrant commands you should know:
If you want to run these commands without parameters, you need to run them in the directory where the Vagrantfile is located. Otherwise, you'll need to pass a Vagrant box ID to them. You can retrieve the list of all Vagrant boxes installed in your system by running `vagrant global-status`.
And that's it. Time out! ⏱
P.S: Incidentally, I input the full text body of this article into
and it estimated it as 4 minutes, 29 seconds. It may take you a wee bit longer to get through the motions described in this article but I didn't promise anything in that regard so... don't call me a liar.