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Vagrant Jumpstart

Introduction

Ever wanted to create a development environment that is guaranteed to work flawlessly on several developers' workstations without the It works on my machine! excuses?
Well, now you can! Just get Vagrant, write your specification and share it with coworkers!

Requirements

Vagrant will be managing the virtual machines of the backend provider of your choice. If you find out it's not listed, consider checking if there's a plugin-based implementation.
Make sure you have a supported provider installed - we'll be using VirtualBox in this guide. You can use our VirtualBox installation guide as a reference.

Installation on EuroLinux 8

Simply run these commands and you're ready to go: 

sudo dnf config-manager \
  --add-repo=https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/RHEL/hashicorp.repo
sudo dnf install vagrant -y

EuroLinux Boxes

A box is a format that defines: an image of an operating system with preinstalled software, a provider for that image and its version - it's a ready-made appliance for that provider to run.
This appliance works the same across people's workstations, which most likely will have differences in configuration and potentially different providers or even operating systems. That is as long as they use a provider, which the box is built for.

EuroLinux Vagrant boxes are available at: https://app.vagrantup.com/eurolinux-vagrant
Let's use the box eurolinux-vagrant/eurolinux-8 as an example.

Box details

See the details of the box - multiple providers, that the box has been built for, are listed along with the box versions and build dates. When writing your specification, you'll be able to choose from them as you wish.

Run the box

Here's a basic procedure for running a Vagrant environment (a virtual machine, which uses our box) in a separate directory: 

mkdir el8-vagrant
cd el8-vagrant/
vagrant init eurolinux-vagrant/eurolinux-8
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

You should now be connected to the machine and able to perform your desired operations inside it.
Go ahead, play around, install your favourite developer tools, build an awesome, advanced, multi-component application and be sure everyone's able to deploy it on their workstations without any hassle!

What about the specification mentioned earlier? - Vagrantfile

Once you've ran the commands above, you'll have a Vagrantfile in the el8-vagrant directory.
Take a look, what's inside. You'll be greeted with an introduction, references and lots of common options along with comments explaining them: 

  # The most common configuration options are documented and commented below.
  # For a complete reference, please see the online documentation at
  # https://docs.vagrantup.com.

As you've already ran the box as explained in the previous section, you can see that there's no necessity to tweak anything inside Vagrantfile. The parameters that you can tweak, e.g. the virtual machine's memory or the amount of CPUs you should adapt to your work - e.g. if you need additional resources for developing/running your application, go ahead and increase them. Once that's done, check out if they can be reduced once you know your software resource requirements.

Depending on the task you want to achieve, whether it be a ready-made appliance or a base virtual system that gets provisioned with your application and its dependencies or something else, that's when changes to the specification must be made - e.g. the additional provisioning procedure shall be written.

As the comment quoted above says, refer to the comments the Vagrantfile provided for common options explanation. Once you know their purpose, try them out! Get comfortable with them and read Upstream's documentation for additional info, tips and more advanced, cool possibilities - such as a multi-machine infrastructure defined in a single Vagrantfile.

Additional resources