Vagrant Quickstart – Live Learning Notes

Hey! I have been learning Ansible to automate server setup. But I was a bit afraid to run my playbook directly on the server. So I thought better is to run it on a virtual machine via vagrant. And if everything works fine here, then I can run it against my server. But the problem is, I never worked with vagrant before. Here, in this article I would start and document my learning path for vagrant. Let’s do it.

My use case is that, I just need a VirtualBox running in which I can SSH. That box should preferably be of Ubuntu, that’s it. I don’t want any more customisation so I won’t get into those complexities of vagrant configuration files in depth.

TLDR

brew install vagrant
brew install virutalbox
vagrant box add ubuntu/focal64
vagrant init ubuntu/focal64
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

The long way

Let’s first read a bit about what vagrant is from their official docs: #1 https://www.vagrantup.com/intro

That #1 was really brief, we obviously need more. Let’s go for practice: #2 https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vagrant/getting-started-index

What I did:

brew install vagrant
vagrant --version
    Vagrant 2.2.10

vagrant box add ubuntu/focal64
vagrant box list
    ubuntu/focal64 (virtualbox, 20201210.0.0)

vagrant init ubuntu/focal64

Now I could notice a “Vagrantfile” in my project directory (from where I ran the above commands). Let’s try vagrant up.

vagrant up

This showed me an error that I would have to installed a third party virtual machine (VM) provider such as VMware, VirtualBox, etc. So I did:

brew install virtualbox
...
<asked me for my password>
...

NOTE:

• Now, I was taken to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> General
• I needed to enable the extension installation from VirtualBox Oracle. As explained in this post: https://medium.com/@Aenon/mac-virtualbox-kernel-driver-error-df39e7e10cd8

Now, when I did vagrant up the virtual machine started working (running).

The next step was to “SSH” into it, and as written in their docs the command is vagrant ssh. It was successfully executed.

But I didn’t want to manually get SSH into vagrant using vagrant ssh. Instead, I wanted my ansible to SSH into this running VM. For that it was necessary to setup my ssh config file ~/.ssh/config. I add the following in it.

Host my-project
   User vagrant
   HostName 127.0.0.1
   Port 2222
   IdentityFile /path/to/my-project-directory/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key

And saving this file. Now running: ssh my-project was leading me to my VM. I also tried

vagrant halt – to shutdown the VM

vagrant suspend – to suspend the VM

vagrant resume – to wake VM up from suspend state

vagrant status – to check the status of current VM (current means the box triggered by the current Vagrantfile in the directory)

vagrant global-status – to check the status of all the VMs on the system.

As my ssh could connect to my running VM, that means, my ansible can also connect. I tried running simple ansible module “ping” on this VM. (file “hosts” contains just one pattern, it should match with your ssh config file host)

cat hosts
    my-project

ansible all -i hosts -m "ping"
    my-project | SUCCESS => {
        "ansible_facts": {
            "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
        },
        "changed": false,
        "ping": "pong"
    }

Cool! Now I can run my playbook on this VM without worry. Following are some more helpful resources:

• https://codereviewvideos.com/course/vagrant-with-ansible-and-symfony2/video/beginners-guide-to-vagrant
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10864372/how-to-ssh-to-vagrant-without-actually-running-vagrant-ssh

Thank you!

• All
• backend
• Booting
• Linux
• Networking
• Open Source
• quicknotes
• Shell
• web
• webdev