Appendix C. Vagrant

 

At various points in this book we use virtual machines to demonstrate a technique for Docker that requires a full machine representation, or even multiple virtual-machine orchestration. Vagrant offers a simple way to start, provision, and manage virtual machines from the command line, and it’s available on several platforms.

Setting up

Go to https://www.vagrantup.com and follow the instructions from there to get set up.

GUIs

When running vagrant up to start up a virtual machine, Vagrant reads the local file called Vagrantfile to determine the settings.

A useful setting that you can create or change within the section for your provider is the gui one: 

v.gui = true

For example, if your provider is VirtualBox, a typical config section might look like this:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "hashicorp/precise64"

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
    v.memory = 1024
    v.cpus = 2
    v.gui = false
  end
end

You could change the v.gui line’s false setting to true (or add it if it isn’t already there) before running vagrant up to get a GUI for the running VM.

Tip

A provider within Vagrant is the name of the program that provides the VM environment. For most users, this will be virtualbox, but it might also be libvirt, openstack, or vmware_fusion (among others).

Memory