Installing Vagrant

In this series, I’ll demonstrate some of the web development tools I use. Today we’ll cover Vagrant — a virtual environment management tool.

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity, and makes the “works on my machine” excuse a relic of the past.

If you are a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment, without sacrificing any of the tools you are used to working with (editors, browsers, debuggers, etc.). Once you or someone else creates a single Vagrantfile, you just need to vagrant up and everything is installed and configured for you to work. Other members of your team create their development environments from the same configuration, so whether you are working on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, all your team members are running code in the same environment, against the same dependencies, all configured the same way. Say goodbye to “works on my machine” bugs.

 

Let’s get into how to setup Vagrant by HashiCorp:

  1. First, make sure you have your virtualization software installed. For this example, we’re running Oracle’s VirtualBox as it’s an excellent and easy to use open source option. See my VirtualBox Installation Guide here.
  2. Find the appropriate package for your system and download it.
  3. Run the installer for your system. The installer will automatically add vagrant to your system path so that it is available in terminals.
  4. Verify that it is installed by running the command vagrant from the command line – it should run without error, and simply output the options available. If you receive an error, please try logging out and logging back into your system (this is particularly necessary sometimes for Windows).

That’s it, you’re all set. Now go ahead and take a look at my Introduction to ScotchBox which is a great web development option, which uses a vagrantbox.

 

Footnote: It’s also worth mentioning that recently Docker has gained a lot of attention and for some web developers its a great option. I’ve only looked into it a bit, and will probably create a series using that tool later this year.

 

Version Disclosure: This document was written while the current version of vagrant is 2.2.4 and virtualbox is 6.0.4 – different versions might be slightly different.