Vagrant up and running

Haven't blogged awhile now, but still trying to push on and get this into my weekly routine. Meanwhile, I have changed company where I worked - joined with startup Tebo. Right now trying to catch up what they have made those years when I was not involved in this project.
I'm not going to stop on this topic a lot because I want to let you know about an awesome tool that colleague Erkki introduced me, it's just amazing. Makes developer life lot easier, it's called Vagrant. I have played around now for two weekends with it, even added to my toolbox and use it right now, when I write this blog. But yeah, I try to give breathe overview of it and hope you will find use of this tool too :)

What is Vagrant?

Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environment, sandboxed in a virtual machine. Vagrant lowers developer environment setup time.
With one command, it does all the following in minutes:

• Creates a virtual machine for you.

• Modifies the physical properties of this virtual machine (e.g., RAM, number of CPUs, etc.).

• Establishes network interfaces so that you can access your virtual machine from your own computer, another device on the same network, or even from another virtual machine.

• Sets up shared folders so that you can continue editing files on your own machine and have those modifications mirror over to the guest machine.

• Boots the virtual machine.

• Sets the hostname of the machine.

• Provisions software on the machine via a shell script or configuration management solution such as Chef, Puppet, or a custom solution.

• Performs host and guest specific tweaking to work around known issues that may arise.

When it’s all done, you have completely sandboxed development environment.
Due to the shared folder and networking, you can continue development using your own editor and browser, but the code runs on a virtual machine, that vagrant has set up for us.

Requirements

Vagrant requires virtualization application, like VMWare or VirtualBox. Because by default vagrant supports VirtualBox, I’m going to use that too.

Vagrantfile

Vagrant is configured per project and each project has it’s own Vagrantfile. In Vagrantfile is described OS, RAM, network settings and so on. This file can be version controlled, so rest development team can stay sync with changes.

Installation

VirtualBox installation

I’m using Fedora 25, so I’m going to describe here how to get VirtualBox and Vagrant installed on Fedora 25. If you are using another operation system, please check out Vagrant website, they have really good documentation.

Add VirtualBox repository and update system.

1sudo su -
2cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
3wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo
4dnf update

Make sure you are running latest installed kernel version.

1rpm -qa kernel |sort -V |tail -n 1
2uname -r

If you got a kernel update, reboot system.

Install Virtualbox dependencies.

1dnf install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers \
2    glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel dkms
3dnf install VirtualBox-5.1

Build needed kernel modules.

1/usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxdrv.sh setup

In order to use VirtualBox, a user must be added to a vboxusers group. This group was created automatically during VirtualBox installation process.

1usermod -a -G vboxusers USERNAME

Vagrant installation

1sudo dnf install vagrant

Note that Fedora use libvirt as default provider, so to use Virtualbox instead you need to set an environment variable for it.

1sudo dnf install -y vagrant vagrant-libvirt libvirt-devel

Project setup

First we gonna need project folder (create one or use existing). Navigate to the folder in terminal.

Create inital Vagrantfile.

1vagrant init centos/7

To run Vagrant machine, run following command. This wil install and set up our virtual machine with setting that is described in Vagrantfile.

1vagrant up --provider virtualbox

By default Vagrant shares project folders with quest machine. For better overview, I’m gonna create new folder under project folder and move my project files there. In Vagrantfile I define new shared folder.

1config.vm.synced_folder "./game", "/server/website"

Now, before rebooting virtual machine, if you are using VirtualBox we need to install Vagrant plugin to make folder sharing possable between guest virtual machine and host machine.

1vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

When installation is completed, we need to reboot virtual machine.

1vagrant reload

To access my project thought webbrowser we gonna need to forward ports and set up simple server.

1config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080

Reboot guest.

1vagrant reload

Now ssh to guest machine and navigate to /vagrant folder.

1vagrant ssh

Now we need to set up python http server.

1sudo python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80

For now, we have vagrant machine up. Inside that we are running server where is hosted my tetris game (not ready yet). If I navigate to https://localhost:8080/game/, I see my tetris game.

Useful commands

1#SSH to machine.
2vagrant ssh
3
4#Check running vagrant machines.
5vagrant status
6
7#Destroy vagrant machine (files in shared folders are not destroyed).
8vagrant destroy
9
10#Shut down virtual machine.
11vagrant halt