This tutorial walks through how to use vagrant a sophisticated virtualisation tool to spin up virtual servers and environments, as well as roll out pre-fabricated operating systems. Additionally we will manipulate our virtual IP addresses and add a domain name (for free) to make the environment as much like production as we can. This of course is just the first steps towards proper configuration, but at least gives a primer on how to quickly and efficiently spin up virtual servers.

Note that you will need a linux operating system in order to follow along, if you have a Mac then that should be fine.

First think that is required is to download and install both Virtual Box and vagrant, these can be found on their respective websites that I have linked in this sentence. In a nutshell, virtual box allows your operating system to spin up virtual servers, and vagrant allows a more simplified command line interface with lightweight available servers pre configured to use.

Once the applications are installed, try running the following command to ensure vagrant is working.

Go to Vagrant cloud.com to look at some popular boxes to install in our system

In a moment we will want to download the Precise 32 bit since it only takes about 300mb of ram to run, the other requires 5/600. If you have about 4 gig ram, then select 32 bit because you can spin up more parallel instances.

We will not download via the website however, we will do all of our work on the terminal command line. First enter the command shown below, ignoring my name before the dollar sign. Note many of the commands I show can not be copied and pasted, I want you to get used to entering these commands into the terminal to develop your muscle memory - it is an essential part towards becoming a skilled programmer.

The above command will download the vagrant file to the directory that you are currently in, but it will not install the image. To do so enter the following command.

Now it is time to spin up an instance of the server image we downloaded, this will actually create the virtual server allocating memory dynamically to the virtual server. Enter the following command to make that happen:

Now the box has been succesfully spun up, and will be running constantly on your computers ram, you should see the following output.

It is time to connect to your virtual server, to do this we want to use the SSH method. When creating the vagrant instance a key pair was generated in order for your local instance to talk to the virtual server. In real work envirionments, these keys will need to be managed and should not be handed out to anyone. Enter the following commands to connect via ssh

You should see the following successful output

Now that is us connected to the precise box, (you can tell by looking at the text preceeding the dollar sign on the command line). As far as your computer is concerned, it is actually connecting to a real server on the internet. It does not know the difference

sudo apt-get install git

Try installing GitHub to see if it works (remember this is installing on the virtual server, not your actual linux local terminal). Press Y to confirm

You should see the following installation success

Now verify by runnning the following command:

git - - version

exit

Lets make this even more realistic by giving it an IP address and a domain name, and as a fake domain name (so we don’t need to purchase it).If we type ls on the command line, we can see the Vagrantfile, this was generated after we did vagrant init command

We are back on our machine, so lets open the vagrant file in sublime text or any other editor you are comfortable with. Try either of these commands

sublime Vagrantfile

sub Vagrantfile

Also do not forget to set the ruby syntax so you can see what code is actually active, in sublime this is in the bottom right hand side of the GUI

You will notice there are only two lines, the rest are just boilerplate stuff.Now uncomment the line as shown above and give it a spoof ID address. In my case I chose 55.55.55.5.

Once complete, save and quit

In the terminal enter the following to restart the virtual server (so IP change can take effect).

vagrant reload

EngineX is a substitute for apache, its what you usually use when running a nodesjs application in production. Run the following commands:

vagrant ssh

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nginx

sudo service nginx start

Now we are running a web server on the IP that we configured within our virtual server - pretty neat!
Lets now exit and we will map to a domain name.

exit

sublime /etc/hosts

sudo open /etc/hosts -a “sublime Text”

If you haven’t touched a hosts file before there are two key rules

vagrant destroy

This is really useful for being able to quickly spin up linux machines, configure them and destroy them when we need to.
Also this allows us to practice making command line deployments to our dev server without blowing up our production server.
Developers chose to run a vagrant file in the repository for their project, whenever their project is open instead of running MAMP that installs apache , mysql and PHP on your machine.

You can actually just run a vagrant box that is configured just like your proaction webserver, then give it an IP address and domain name, like dev.myawesomewebsite.com so now your machine is not tied to one project. Lots of times what will happen is a developer will have a problem on their machine, but not see that problem on another machine because they may be running a different version of PHP or RUBY or a slightly different version of MAC OS.
This way the code you are writing, is running on the exact same virtual box that all the other DEVs on your team are running their code on. Another great thing is whenever you SSH to the vagrant VS, you can access the code from your GitHub repo in the virtual server that anyone who connects to that VS can access. This solves the problem of the old, it doesn’t happen on my machine routine.

Vagrant's basic commands
All commands should be executed inside the VDD directory.

SSH into virtual machine.

$ vagrant ssh

$ vagrant up

$ vagrant share

$ vagrant halt

$ vagrant destroy

$ vagrant provision

$ vagrant reload