Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments. For more information, see the part of the getting started guide on “Why Vagrant?”

Quick Start

First, make sure your development machine has VirtualBox installed. The setup from that point forward is very easy, since Vagrant is simply a rubygem.

gem install vagrant

To build your first virtual environment:

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

Note: The above vagrant up command will also trigger Vagrant to download the lucid32 box via the specified URL. Vagrant only does this if it detects that the box doesn't already exist on your system.

Getting Started Guide and Video

To learn how to build a fully functional rails development environment, view the getting started guide.

There is also a fairly short (12 minute) getting started video which explains how to build a fully functional LAMP development environment, which covers a few parts of Vagrant in more detail than the website guide.

Installing the Gem from Git

If you want the bleeding edge version of Vagrant, we try to keep master pretty stable and you're welcome to give it a shot. The following is an example showing how to do this:

rake install

Contributing to Vagrant

To hack on vagrant, you'll need bundler which can be installed with a simple gem install bundler --pre. Afterwords, do the following:

bundle install
rake

This will run the test suite, which should come back all green! Then you're good to go!

If you want to run Vagrant without having to install the gem, you may use bundle exec, like so:

bundle exec bin/vagrant help