Vagrantfile Explained: Setting Up and Provisioning with Shell

In the first part of this article, we showed you how to create a Vagrant base box, installing the latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in the virtual machine to use it as the guest operating system.

In this part you will learn how to setup a development environment using Vagrant, which you can use and reuse in your development. Note that while you can use the box we created in the previous part for the remainder of this post, you don’t have to - this will all work on any Ubuntu based Vagrant box.

The Vagrantfile

The primary configuration location for any Vagrant development environment is a file called Vagrantfile which you need to place in your project’s folder.

The configuration syntax of this Vagrantfile is Ruby, but you do not need to be a Ruby programmer or have any knowledge of the programming language to write this configuration file. You’ll mostly do basic variable assignment in the configuration.

Every configuration option you will need you can place inside this file.

Let’s go ahead and create a test folder called vagrant-tutorial and inside this folder create the file named Vagrantfile so your folder structure looks like this:

About provisioning

The primary purpose of Vagrant is to have a base virtual machine and to give you the framework for creating automatic software installations and configurations in the virtual machine.

By letting Vagrant handle the provisioning of software, it also gives you the flexibility in configuration and more importantly, makes this process repeatable and automatic.

Vagrant doesn’t care how you provision the virtual machine, it offers multiple options ranging from basic shell scripts to software automation managers such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible. You can even configure it to use multiple provisioners at the same time.

Ofcourse there’s always the possibility to vagrant ssh into the base virtual machine and install your required software manually, but that defeats the purpose of Vagrant and all the flexibility it offers when provisioning a box.

Provisioning prerequisites

Before we can start provisioning the base box, we need to set a few required options in our configuration file.

Vagrant API version

Vagrant uses API versions for its configuration file, this is how it can stay backwards compatible. So in every Vagrantfile we need to specify which version to use. The current one is version 2 which works with Vagrant 1.1 and up. Let’s write this block in our Vagrantfile.

Continue reading %Vagrantfile Explained: Setting Up and Provisioning with Shell%

more