Vagrant is My New Best Friend

Vagrant is my new best friend. Well, really it is the latest tool I’m adding to my development toolbox - or I should say my DevOps toolbox.

Vagrant is a Ruby-based utility for simple interaction with VirtualBox (Oracle’s open source virtualization product). Rather than posting a tutorial…this is how simple it is:

<code>$ gem install vagrant
$ vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
$ vagrant init
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh</code>

Of course, you have to have already installed VirtualBox. But, this gets you a basic Ubuntu Lucid (32-bit) environment, installed, running and logged in. How cool is that???

This works great for me, as one of my target environments is CentOS 5.5. Yep, you guessed it - theres an available CentOS5.5 box available for downloading/running. I’ve learned the hard way that you have to keep each environment in its own directory, because the VM settings are stored in a file called Vagrantfile.

<code>$ mkdir CentOS5.5 && cd CentOS5.5
$ vagrant box add centos http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15307300/vagrant-0.7-centos-64-base.box
$ vagrant init centos
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh</code>

It’s also possible to configure the VM using Puppet - but again my intent isn’t for this to be a tutorial, so check the Vagrant docs if you’re interested. I do this so I can quickly get Subversion and a few other tools install really quickly.