Vagrant - console wrapper for VirtualBox

by Gregor Uhlenheuer on October 3, 2011

Vagrant is a nice and convenient tool to dynamically build configurable, lightweight and portable virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox. Using this tool it is possible to quickly establish, configure and initialize new development environments. It is even possible to package already configured environments for deployment so other developers can recreate the virtual machine with just a few commands.

Installation

To get you going as quickly as possible I am shortly describing with steps you have to do to install Vagrant on your system.

Ruby and RubyGems

Vagrant is written in Ruby and published as a RubyGem – so you have to install Ruby and RubyGems_ at first. In my case on Gentoo Linux this is nothing more than running:

$ emerge -av ruby rubygems

VirtualBox

Since Vagrant is utilizing VirtualBox you have to install that one of course. VirtualBox is an open-source full virtualizer for x86 hardware and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and Solaris. In order to install VirtualBox you either use your distribution’s package manager or go the download page and install it manually. On Gentoo Linux you can use emerge of course.

$ emerge -av ">=virtualbox-4.1"

It is important to note that only the versions 4.1.x of VirtualBox are compatible with Vagrant. If you are running on a stable gentoo profile you currently have to unmask the version 4.1.2 of VirtualBox by adding the following lines to your package.keywords file:

$ echo "app-emulation/virtualbox
        app-emulation/virtualbox-modules
        app-emulation/virtualbox-additions
        dev-util/kbuild" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

Moreover it might be necessary to add the qt4 USE flag in order to build the VirtualBox executable:

$ echo "app-emulation/virtualbox qt4" >> /etc/portage/package.use

Now all there is to do is to add your user to the vboxusers group and start the necessary virtualbox kernel modules:

$ usermod -a -G vboxusers <username>
$ modprobe vboxdrv vboxnetflt vboxnetadp

Instead of manually starting the virtualbox kernel modules every time you can also autoload them by modifying the /etc/conf.d/modules file accordingly.

Vagrant

Once this is done all requirements are set you can go ahead and install Vagrant itself:

$ gem install vagrant

On my gentoo machine I had some trouble using gem via RVM ¹ because the gentoo developers set the RUBYOPT environment variable to -rauto_gem by default. In this case you would have to unset the variable beforehand:

$ unset RUBYOPT
$ gem install vagrant

Virtual environment box

Now that Vagrant is installed you are able to fetch a prebuilt virtual machine image (called “box”) and build a new development environment based on that:

$ vagrant box add newbox http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
$ vagrant init newbox
$ vagrant up

The default box named “lucid32” which you usually use is a bare bone installation of 32-bit Ubuntu Lucid (10.04). The name “newbox” is just an arbitrary name for the fresh box image – you can choose whatever name you like.

In case you encounter problems with ssh’ing into your new virtual environment on executing vagrant up or vagrant ssh you should check if you define an alias of localhost in your /etc/hosts file like:

127.0.0.1 localhost name alias

After I removed the alias Vagrant worked like it is supposed to.

RVM: Ruby Version Manager↩

This post is tagged with linux, gentoo, console and virtualization