Boxes are what Vagrant manages for you. A box is an instance of a virtual machine cloned from a repository of template boxes.
Template boxes can be automatically downloaded from a repo similar to Docker Hub or manually imported from a file.
You can also create your own.
The public repo provided by Hashicorp is at https://app.vagrantup.com/
To import the box for this tutorial from a file use
vagrant box add freebsd-133-ufs.box --name punktde/freebsd-133-ufsA provider is a hypervisor providing the environment to run your VM. Providers are among others
- VirtualBox
- libvirt/KVM
- Vmware Workstation/Fusion
- ...
The most common provider for development on a desktop machine is probably VirtualBox.
There is an ongoing effort to make Intel/AMD64 virtual machines run in VirtualBox on an Apple Silicon Mac.
The Vagrantfile is a high level description of your Vagrant project, the box(es) used and their particular configuration.
It's essentially Ruby turned into DSL.
Vagrant uses a fixed not-so-private SSH key to login to the VM at first startup. The key is then replaced with a dynamically generated one specific to the particular project.
The state, specific settings, and most important the SSH private key for a project are
stored in <project directory>/.vagrant.
Template boxes, plugins, global settings are stored in ~/.vagrant.d.
Vagrant by default uses bash as the shell to execute commands inside the
box. In the box we use for this tutorial bash is available by default.
In case it isn't you need to specify the shell for your project in
the Vagrantfile like this
config.ssh.shell = '/bin/sh'