Introduction to Vagrant

Introduction to Vagrant
Marcelo Correia Pinheiro
Friday, March 29, 13

What is Vagrant?
A tool to build development environments based on
virtual machines
Focused to create environments that are similar as
possible or identical with production servers
Created by Mitchell Hashimoto
Written in Ruby
Initially builted on top of VirtualBox API, today offers
VMWare Fusion support (as $79 per licence)


How I install Vagrant?

Get VirtualBox ﬁrst
Download installer on Vagrant site (Debian, CentOS,
Windows, OSX, other OS’s)
Get a Vagrant box


What is a Vagrant Box?

Is a previously builted Vagrant virtual machine image,
ready-to-run
Available in a lot of platforms (Linux, Windows, BSD)
You can create one! :)


How I add a box?

Great box repository: www.vagrantbox.es
Run this command:

$ vagrant box add <name> <url> <provider> # virtualbox


How I create a environment?

Inside your project, create a Vagrantﬁle:

$ vagrant init <your box name>


How I create a environment?

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

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
# All Vagrant configuration is done here. The most common configuration
# options are documented and commented below. For a complete reference,
# please see the online documentation at vagrantup.com.

# Every Vagrant virtual environment requires a box to build off of.
config.vm.box = "my_precious_box"

# ...
# A list of options here
# ...
end


How I start to use it?

Simply run this command:

$ vagrant up


How I connect to it?

Easy:

$ vagrant ssh


How I stop it?

Easy:

$ vagrant halt


How I restart it?

Easy:

$ vagrant reload


How I access it?
You need to set forwarding ports between guest and
host to work (bind on 0.0.0.0!)
Just add the following code in your Vagrantﬁle, restart
server and access in browser:

# vi: set ft=ruby :

# ...

config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 3000, host: 3000

# ...
end


How I customize it?
You can change memory, CPU cores and other things in Vagrantﬁle
Just see VBoxManage options
Example:

# vi: set ft=ruby :

# ...

config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
vb.customize [ 'modifyvm', :id, '--memory', '1024' ]
vb.customize [ 'modifyvm', :id, '--cpus', '4' ]
end

# ...
end


That’s it?
Of course, no! :)
It’s time to conﬁgure environment using available provisioners to install
required software:
Chef Solo
Chef Server
Puppet Apply
Puppet Server
Shell
CFEngine (experimental)


Using Chef Solo

First, run chef-solo installation based on Opscode
website in your guest:

$ sudo true && curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | sudo bash


Using Chef Solo
Get all necessary recipes from Opscode site
Great repo with a lot of recipes
Manual recipe dependency resolution sometimes

# vi: set ft=ruby :

# ...

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
chef.add_recipe 'apt'
chef.add_recipe 'build-essential'
chef.add_recipe 'ruby1.9'
chef.add_recipe 'mondodb'
chef.add_recipe 'redis'
end

# ...
end


Using Chef Solo
Or Install berkshelf
Vagrant plugin very similar to Bundler
generate a Berksﬁle in app root and run:

source :opscode

cookbook 'mysql'
cookbook 'nginx', '~> 0.101.5'

$ berks install --path vendor/cookbooks


Using Chef Server
Conﬁgure Vagrantﬁle to use a Chef Server as a
repository
Requires a URL and a PEM key to connect

# vi: set ft=ruby :

# ...

config.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
chef.chef_server_url = 'https://your-chef-server.devops.com'
chef.validation_key_path = 'your-private-key.pem'
end

# ...
end


Using Puppet Apply

Install Puppet from ofﬁcial repository in your guest VM:

# wget http://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-squeeze.deb
# dpkg -i puppetlabs-release-squeeze.deb


Using Puppet Apply

Change Vagrantﬁle to use Puppet manifest ﬁles:

# vi: set ft=ruby :

# ...

config.vm.provision :puppet do |puppet|
puppet.manifests_path = 'manifests'
puppet.manifest_file = 'my-devops-puppet-manifest.pp'
end

# ...
end


Using Puppet Apply

Write Puppet manifest with all software that your app
needs
Depending of what you need, some additional
conﬁguration is required


Using Puppet Server
Change Vagrantﬁle to connect on a Puppet Server
Set node hostname if you need
Add some options too

# vi: set ft=ruby :

# ...

config.vm.provision :puppet_server do |puppet|
puppet.puppet_server = 'http://your-master-of-puppets.devops.com'
puppet.puppet_node = 'my-precious-puppet.devops.com'
puppet.options = '--verbose --debug'
end

# ...
end


Using Shell
Create a single bash script that installs all you need:

#!/bin/bash

apt-get update

# base
apt-get install --yes python nginx mongodb-server redis-server

# others
apt-get install --yes curl tmux htop

(...)

# some additional configuration here

(...)


Installing software

Easy:

$ vagrant provision


Creating a custom box
You can create custom boxes to distribute between
development teams
Requires a fresh installation of a virtual machine based
on Vagrant conventions and some manual conﬁguration
Awesome advantage: you can repackage a existent
Vagrant package after updating a existent VM
Next steps are based on Debian distro as VM with
VirtualBox as provider



Installation steps:
set root password: vagrant
create a user with login vagrant and pwd vagrant
machine name: vagrant-debian-squeeze
machine host: vagrantup.com


Post-installation steps:
Install sudo on virtual machine
Add a group permission with visudo:
%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL
Download SSH insecure pair ﬁles:
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/tree/master/keys/
Save public key on GUEST in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and all
keys in HOST
Or generate a custom pair of SSH keys and distribute it



Install VirtualBox Guest Additions with /Cmd|Ctrl/-D
Remove pre-installed packages:

# apt-get remove --purge virtualbox-ose-*


VirtualBox needs xorg drivers, kernel headers and
gcc to correctly build Guest Additions kernel module.
Run:

# apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential xorg



Run VirtualBox Guest Additions installer:

# mount /media/cdrom
# sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run



After all steps, shutdown your VM
Execute in host:

$ vagrant package <vm-name> --base <package-name> --output
<box-file>

$ vagrant box add <package-name> <box-file> virtualbox



If you don’t want to build step-by-step, try veewee
https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee
Supports VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox and KVM
Enable boxing based on a ISO ﬁle
Run as a Vagrant Plugin


Performance Tips
Slow I/O on Guest
Enable Host I/O cache on SATA Controller
Slow with CPU-bound tasks
Set Motherboard Chipset to ICH9
Still searching for a solution to slow webserver
bootstrap (Ruby / Python)
Anomalous kernel CPU execution time while loading


FAQ Time

It’s time to make a question! :)


Thank you! :)


Introduction to Vagrant

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