Vagrant is cool:

Vagrant provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team.

Furthermore:

Vagrant stands on the shoulders of giants. Machines are provisioned on top of VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, or any other provider. Then, industry-standard provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet, can be used to automatically install and configure software on the machine.

In this post I’ll show you how to get started with Vagrant using a virtual Ubuntu Linux box. Moreover, I will cover how to use a simple provisioning technique (shell provisioning) for installing custom stuff into your virtual box on boot-up.

Vagrant basics

To follow along, you must first install Vagrant and VirtualBox. When you are done, cd to some folder (e.g. cd ~/Documents/trying-vagrant) and let’s get started:

Initialize Vagrant (“vagrant init”) using an Ubuntu Trusty Tahr image (https://vagrantcloud.com/ubuntu/trusty64/version/1/provider/virtualbox.box):

vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64

This creates a new file, Vagrantfile:

$ ls
Vagrantfile

Now, using the Vagrantfile that was created, boot the box (“vagrant up”). If this is the first time, vagrant will first download the image from the cloud (could take a while):

vagrant up

When done with the booting up, SSH into the machine (“vagrant ssh”):

vagrant ssh
# do some stuff, like ls and what not
^D  # to quit

Bring down the box (“vagrant destroy”). Oh I love this, can’t help myself but sound it out “deSTROY” in a super villain voice:

vagrant destroy

If this worked, let’s move on to installing some custom stuff on boot-up.

Installing stuff on “vagrant up”

There are many ways to install stuff on vagrant up, e.g. using shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet. Here, I will use a shell script because it is simple and clean.

Shell provisioning is a simple way to install stuff on “vagrant up”. First, let us create a shell script (“install.sh”) that we will later reference from the Vagrantfile. Furthermore, let’s live a little and install BrainFuck along with a hello world program.

install.sh:

#!/bin/sh
sudo apt-get install bf
echo '++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.' > helloworld.b

(Remember to “chmod 744” the install.sh script). Now, add a few lines of code to your Vagrantfile and you’re golden. After the edit, the file should look like this.

Vagrantfile:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

# Vagrantfile API/syntax version. Don't touch unless you know what you're doing!
VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.provision "shell", path: "install.sh"
end

Now, let’s test that it worked:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
# now on virtual machine:
$ bf helloworld.b
Hello World!

Summary

In this post, I showed you how to get started with Vagrant, and how to provision stuff on “vagrant up” using a shell script.