Vagrant

Vagrant (2010) is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual development environments. The core idea behind its creation lies in the fact that the environment maintenance becomes increasingly difficult in a large project with multiple technical stacks.

Vagrant manages all the necessary configurations for the developers in order to avoid the unnecessary maintenance and setup time, and increases development productivity. Vagrant is written in the Ruby language, but its ecosystem supports development in almost all major languages.

Vagrant uses "Provisioners" and "Providers" as building blocks to manage the development environments. Provisioners are tools that allow users to customize the configuration of virtual environments. Puppet and Chef are the two most widely used provisioners in the Vagrant ecosystem. Providers are the services that Vagrant uses to set up and create virtual environments. Support for VirtualBox, Hyper-V, and Docker virtualization ships with Vagrant, while VMWare and AWS are supported via plugins.

Vagrant sits on top of virtualization software as a wrapper and helps the developer interact easily with the providers. It automates the configuration of virtual environments using Chef or Puppet, and the user does not have to directly use any other virtualization software.

Machine and software requirements are written in a file called Vagrantfile to execute necessary steps in order to create a development-ready box. Box is a format and an extension ( .box) for Vagrant environments that is copied to another machine in order to replicate the same environment.

Installation

• macOS: brew cask install vagrant
• Ubuntu: apt install vagrant

Vagrant Basic commands

• vagrant up
  • vagrant up --debug or VAGRANT_LOG=loud vagrant up for debugging

purposes

• vagrant init
• vagrant destroy
• vagrant ssh
• vagrant roles enable
• vagrant box add: vagrant box add bento/ubuntu-20.04
• vagrant box list
• vagrant reload
• vagrant status
• vagrant box update

Help

vagrant
Usage: vagrant [options] <command> [<args>]

    -h, --help                       Print this help.

Common commands:
     box             manages boxes: installation, removal, etc.
     cloud           manages everything related to Vagrant Cloud
     destroy         stops and deletes all traces of the vagrant machine
     global-status   outputs status Vagrant environments for this user
     halt            stops the vagrant machine
     help            shows the help for a subcommand
     init            initializes a new Vagrant environment by creating a Vagrantfile
     login
     package         packages a running vagrant environment into a box
     plugin          manages plugins: install, uninstall, update, etc.
     port            displays information about guest port mappings
     powershell      connects to machine via powershell remoting
     provision       provisions the vagrant machine
     push            deploys code in this environment to a configured destination
     rdp             connects to machine via RDP
     reload          restarts vagrant machine, loads new Vagrantfile configuration
     resume          resume a suspended vagrant machine
     snapshot        manages snapshots: saving, restoring, etc.
     ssh             connects to machine via SSH
     ssh-config      outputs OpenSSH valid configuration to connect to the machine
     status          outputs status of the vagrant machine
     suspend         suspends the machine
     up              starts and provisions the vagrant environment
     upload          upload to machine via communicator
     validate        validates the Vagrantfile
     version         prints current and latest Vagrant version
     winrm           executes commands on a machine via WinRM
     winrm-config    outputs WinRM configuration to connect to the machine

For help on any individual command run `vagrant COMMAND -h`

Additional subcommands are available, but are either more advanced
or not commonly used. To see all subcommands, run the command
`vagrant list-commands`.
        --[no-]color                 Enable or disable color output
        --machine-readable           Enable machine readable output
    -v, --version                    Display Vagrant version
        --debug                      Enable debug output
        --timestamp                  Enable timestamps on log output
        --debug-timestamp            Enable debug output with timestamps
        --no-tty                     Enable non-interactive output

Related terms

• Packer

See also

• DevOps: CI/CD, IaC, DevSecOps, SecOps, GitOps, WebOps, Amazon DevOps Guru, DevOps jobs, Platform engineer, SRE, MLOps, DORA
• Virtualization: KVM, VirtualBox, multipass, containers, Vagrant, Packer, Hyper-V, VMware, Parallels, Bhyve, Virtual machine
• HashiCorp: HCP, Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Vagrant, Sentinel, Consul, Packer, Waypoint, Boundary, Mitchell Hashimoto, Armon Dadgar

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile/

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/cli/up.html

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/other/debugging.html