A talk I gave at Day Camp for Developers (DC4D) on using Vagrant to create automated virtualized environments for development.

1. John Coggeshall

2. John Coggeshall
PHP Core Developer
Freelancer
@coogle

3. What’s Vagrant?
Vagrant is a tool for managing the
creation and management of self-contained
development
environments.
Think of it as a tool that combines a
few different technologies together
into one bag of awesome.

4. What’s Vagrant?

5. Benefits & Drawbacks of Vagrant
 Get people up and running fast
Completely Sandboxed
Consistent Deployment
Version Controlled
Safety Net
Large Upfront investment *
Requires learning new stuff
Takes up a lot of space
Increases complexity

6. Getting Started
So how do we get
started?
1) Download tools
2) Define Environment
3) Prosper
Tools you’ll need:
 Vagrant
 http://www.vagrantup.com/
 VirtualBox
 http://www.virtualbox.org

7. Vagrant Commands
There are many commands
to interact with your
environment available to
you via Vagrant
We will discuss some of
them in this talk, but they
are fully documented here:
https://docs.vagrantup.com
/v2/cli/index.html
Useful Vagrant CLI commands
Bring up a VM
$ vagrant up
Power down a VM
$ vagrant halt
Reboot a VM
$ vagrant reload
SSH into a VM
$ vagrant ssh
Destroy / delete a VM
$ vagrant destroy

8. Vagrant Providers
Vagrant supports a number of
different providers (the technology
that creates the virtual environment)
For us we’re using the VirtualBox
and Amazon EC2 providers as they
are “free”
Providers are extendable as plug-ins
A VMWare provider is also available

9. Getting Started
Once you have the tools the first
step in creating your environment is
to select a box to use.
Boxes are ready to run virtual
machines in a variety of OSes
A large selection of pre-made boxes
are available for use:
http://www.vagrantbox.es
Debian
Ubuntu
Windows
BSD

10. Creating an Environment
Vagrant environments are defined
through a file called a
VagrantFile.
To create a stub of this file, from the
root of your project execute the
following command:
$ vagrant init [box name]
$ vagrant box add
precise64
http://files.vagrantup
.com/precise64.box
virtualbox
$ cd /myproject
$ vagrant init precise64

12. Tools to help build a Vagrantfile
A Vagrantfile as you’ve seen is
basically Ruby.
There are also a number of online
tools available to help you generate
these files using a UI if that’s what
you prefer.
Generate your Vagrantfile online
Rove
http://rove.io/
PuPHPet
http://puphpet.com/

13. Vagrant Provisioners
Provisioners are various tools
(extendable as plug-ins) for
configuring the virtual environment
Vagrant supports a number of
various provisioners out of box, most
notably Puppet and Chef
Vagrant Provisioners
• File
• Shell
• Ansible
• CFEngine
• Chef
• Docker
• Puppet
• Salt

14. Making the Most of Vagrant
 There are a number of ways to improve your
Vagrant experience at various points that are
worth mentioning
 Streamlining environment creation
 Improving performance of the environment
 Etc.
 Let’s take a look at a few of them.

15. Improving Performance
 There are a number of ways to improve the
performance of the virtual environment
 Provider Selection –VMWare does better than
VirtualBox
 For VMWare there are a few things you can
do as well
 Use NFS to share the project
 Use all CPU cores
 Use ¼ of system memory

16. Improving Creation Time
 There are a number of things you can do to
simply the complexity of using a tool like
Vagrant to build environments
 Don’t use provisioners
 Create skeleton projects

17. Skipping Provisioners
 If you want, you don’t necessarily have to use
any provisioners at all when using Vagrant
 Boot up a box, login, and configure the
environment manually
 Use vagrant package to create a .box from your
configured VM
 Provide this to others
 Easier, but you lose some visibility and
management that you get from provisioners

18. Creating a Skeleton
 IMHO, better than simply packaging boxes is
to create a skeleton of your basic projects and
build off of them as necessary
 I have created said skeleton projects
 http://github.com/coogle/skeleton
 Same speed in ramp-up time without losing
the power of the provisioners

19. Questions? Please rate my talk: http://joind.in/11664