Vagrant

📙 IMPORTANT -- These are my personal vagrant files for... random things. Many are a WIP and may or may not be in a useful or even functional state. Use at your own risk.

Install Vagrant

Vagrant is an easy way for developers to spin up new hosts for testing. It relies upon an underlying "provider" to actually perform the virtualization and networking for a guest VM, but Vagrant helps by providing a convenient and somewhat consistent interface for managing these resources quickly.

Typically, VirtualBox is the go-to provider, since it's fairly cross-platform and offers a Windows, Mac, and Linux installer, but the backend provider could be Hyper-V on Windows, KVM (libvirt) on Linux, or even a cloud provider like AWS--though there aren't always images on app.vagrantup.com for other providers, so use VirtualBox if you can.

Follow the VirtualBox and Vagrant installation guides appropriate for your environment:

• https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch02.html
• https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/installation

Vagrant plugins

Vagrant offers plugins to extend it's functionality. These are the ones I use.

• vagrant-reload -- Normally, when a guest reboots during the provisioning process, it will cause the vagrant up or vagrant reload to fail, or it will ignore any steps afterwards. This allows you to insert a reboot in the provisioning process to: (1) pause, (2) wait for the guest to reboot, and (3) continue. It's especially useful for Windows guests.
• vagrant-scp -- Adds support for vagrant scp <src> <dest>, which IMHO should be included in Vagrant by default. You can do this with stock Vagrant, in the same way you can use plain ssh vs vagrant ssh, but it's a giant pain to calculate/resolve the guest name to ip/port due to all the port forwarding.
• vagrant-sshfs -- Normally, when adding a synced_folder in your Vagrantfile, it falls back to either a one-way copy of the files or, worse yet, advises you to use a CIFS share (SMBv1? yikes!) unless the guest has the appropriate tools installed. Getting the tools installed on the guest is particularly troublesome for older Linux distros. If using VirtualBox, it requires VBoxGuestAdditions to be installed (or a compatible equivalent), since it uses vboxsf under the hood when available. Regardless, SSH is more ubiquitous and is almost always present anyway, so sshfs provides a convenient solution and works with the OS of your choice.
• vagrant-vbguest -- If you're using VirtualBox as the provider (the most common), this will auto-install the VBoxGuestAdditions during the provisioning process, which helps with all manner of things (better folder sync support, graphics compatibility, convenient console GUI fixes, etc).
  • NOTE: Use this plugin with care. It can cause builds to be slower and can sometimes cause issues.

Install these with:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload
vagrant plugin install vagrant-scp
vagrant plugin install vagrant-sshfs
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest # use with care