First Vagrant VM

13 Nov 2014 10:18

This is part of my quest to sort out my website. Bringing up the VM.

To bring up a new VM using vagrant, we’re going to run vagrant init. This writes a skeleton Vagrantfile to the current directory, so we probably want to invent a directory to keep it in:

mkdir -p ~/Vagrant/trusty64
cd ~/Vagrant/trusty64
vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64

This will create an example Vagrantfile. Before continuing, we’ll make a few tweaks to it.

Note that if you don’t want the commented-out example sections, use the following instead:

vagrant init --minimal ubuntu/trusty64

Machine Name

We need to change the machine name in three places:

The name that Vagrant uses.
The name that VirtualBox uses. The default is the name of the containing folder plus a timestamp.
The name that the machine itself uses.

To do this, we’ll need to make some changes to the Vagrantfile, as follows:

HOST_NAME = "trusty64"

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  # Ordinarily, Vagrant refers to this machine as 'default'. This changes that
  # name.
  config.vm.define HOST_NAME do |h|
  end

  # This is the hostname that the virtual machine uses internally.
  config.vm.hostname = HOST_NAME

  # VirtualBox configuration.
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
    # Use the specified name in VirtualBox as well.
    v.name = HOST_NAME
  end
end

Memory, CPU cores, etc.

Again, this is from Vagrant’s documentation for Virtual Configuration:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
  v.memory = 2048
  v.cpus = 2
end

SSH tweaks

You might also want to add the following:

# SSH configuration
config.ssh.forward_agent = true
config.ssh.forward_x11 = true

Modeline tweaks

I prefer the modeline to be at the bottom of the file, so I usually move it. And, because I’m using vim, I edit it slightly:

# vim: sw=2:ts=2:sts=2:set ft=ruby:

I don’t know what the equivalent emacs modeline would be ;-)

Turning on the VM

vagrant up

At this point you should have a running VM, configured appropriately. You can connect to it with:

vagrant ssh