Second Edition

Vagrant is an open source software used to create

and manage virtual development environments. It can
be considered a wrapper around virtualization software
such as VirtualBox and configuration management
software such as Chef, Ansible, and Puppet.
This book looks at the potential that virtualization
offers us, and breaks down the process of creating
a distributable and powerful virtual development
environment. You will learn how to create more
advanced
development
environments
consisting
of multiple virtual machines, allowing you to mimic
multi-server production environments.

What you will learn from this book

Integrate your own machine with the virtual
machine of your development environment
Install Vagrant on multiple platforms such as
Windows, OS X, and Linux
Familiarize yourself with Vagrant operations
such as port forwarding, disk mapping,
and networking
Install and manage software packages using
Puppet, Ansible, and Chef

Who this book is written for

Set up and control multiple virtual machines

simultaneously within the same project

If you are a developer who wants to have your

development environment accurately reflect your live
servers to tackle the ever-increasing complexity of
web and software projects, this book is most certainly
intended for you!

Discover how to set up a simple LEMP server

for a Vagrant project

$ 32.99 US
21.99 UK

community experience distilled

P U B L I S H I N G

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

Michael Peacock

It's assumed that you know the basics of Linux systems in

the context of web-based projects.

Build and manage your own base box

for Vagrant

Sa
m

pl

C o m m u n i t y
Second Edition

Finally, you'll gain an insight into Vagrant Cloud, which

is a suite of web services built into Vagrant that allows
you to remotely view applications on a Vagrant instance.

ee

Creating Development Environments with Vagrant

Creating Development
Environments with Vagrant

Fr

E x p e r i e n c e

D i s t i l l e d

Creating Development
Environments with Vagrant
Second Edition
Leverage the power of Vagrant to create and manage virtual
development environments with Puppet, Chef, and VirtualBox

Michael Peacock

In this package, you will find:

The author biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 9 'HashiCorp Atlas'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Creating Development Environments with Vagrant
Second Edition

About the Author

Michael Peacock is an experienced software developer and team lead from
Newcastle, UK, with a degree in software engineering from the University of Durham.
After spending a number of years running his own web agency, and subsequently,
working directly for a number of software start-ups, he now runs his own software
development agency, working on a range of projects for an array of different clients.
He is the author of Creating Development Environments with Vagrant, PHP 5 Social
Networking, PHP 5 E-Commerce Development, Drupal 7 Social Networking, and
Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce and Building Websites with TYPO3, all by
Packt Publishing. The other publications Michael has been involved in include Advanced
API Security, Mobile Web Development, Jenkins Continuous Integration Cookbook,
and Drupal for Education and E-Learning; for these he acted as a technical reviewer.
Michael has also presented at a number of user groups and technical conferences,
including PHP UK Conference, Dutch PHP Conference, ConFoo, PHPNE, PHPNW,
and Could Connect Santa Clara.
You can follow Michael on Twitter (
out more about him through his website (

), or find
).

I'd like to thank the team at Packt Publishing for their help in getting
this revised edition of the book published, and the technical reviewers
for ensuring technical accuracy in the book.

Creating Development
Environments with Vagrant
Second Edition
Web-based software projects are increasingly complicated, with a range of different
dependencies, requirements, and interlinking components. Swapping between projects,
which require different versions of the same software, becomes troublesome. Getting
team members up and running on new projects becomes time-consuming. Vagrant is a
powerful tool used to create, manage, and work with virtualized development
environments for your projects. By creating a virtual environment for each project,
their dependencies and requirements are isolated, they also don't interfere with the
software installed on your own machine such as WAMP or MAMP. Colleagues can
be up and running on a new project in minutes with a single command. With Vagrant,
we can wipe the slate clean if we break our environment and be back up and running
in no time.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Vagrant, introduces the concept of virtualization, its
importance in the role of the development environment, and walks you through the
Vagrant installation process.
Chapter 2, Managing Vagrant Boxes and Projects, walks you through creating Vagrant
projects, exploring and configuring the Vagrantfile, and working with base boxes.
Chapter 3, Provisioning with Puppet, explores Puppet, the provisioning tool, and how
to create Puppet manifests to provision a server.
Chapter 4, Using Ansible, explores Ansible, the provisioning tool, and how to create
Ansible playbooks to provision a server.
Chapter 5, Using Chef, explores Chef, the provisioning tool, and how to create Chef
recipes to provision a server.
Chapter 6, Provisioning Vagrant Machines with Puppet, Ansible, and Chef, discusses
how to use Puppet, Ansible, and Chef within the context of Vagrant to provision
development environments.
Chapter 7, Working with Multiple Machines, explores using Vagrant to create and
manage projects that use multiple virtual machines, which communicate with each other.

Chapter 8, Creating Your Own Box, discusses the process of creating your own base box
for use within a Vagrant project.
Chapter 9, HashiCorp Atlas, walks you through using Vagrant Share to share SSH and
HTTP(S) access to a Vagrant-managed machine, and how to use the services provided
through the Vagrant Cloud.
Appendix, A Sample LEMP Stack, walks you through the process of creating a LEMP
server within a new Vagrant project.

HashiCorp Atlas
HashiCorp Atlas (https://atlas.hashicorp.com), formerly Vagrant Cloud, is a
suite of online services provided by HashiCorp (the commercial company behind
Vagrant), which adds additional capabilities to Vagrant and brings together many
of their open source components. Primarily, Atlas supports two features:

Vagrant Share: The ability to share access to your Vagrant environment and
to allow others to remotely connect to it

Vagrant box discovery and sharing: The ability to share Vagrant boxes
with others, hosting the metadata for boxes, their versions, and facilitating
box updates

These features are available free of charge, though paying customers can gain access
to additional functionality, including the following:

Custom and static domain names for Vagrant Share

Private boxes that can be shared with specific teams privately

Box hosting: Vagrant Cloud will actually store the box file on their platform
as well as the metadata

Support for Windows and Mac Vagrant boxes

Granular support for user access controls

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

How to discover and use boxes provided on Atlas

How to distribute your own boxes on Atlas

How to allow others to connect to your Vagrant machine through Atlas

How to share your Vagrant machine through Atlas

HashiCorp Atlas

Discovering boxes
The Atlas website contains a directory of public boxes for Vagrant (https://atlas.
hashicorp.com/boxes/search). Within this directory, we can search for the specific
operating system or distribution version that we are interested in:

For each result, we can see the box name, which is formatted as the name of the
distributor followed by a slash, followed by the name or distribution name. In the
following case, we have the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release that HashiCorp has provided
(named hashicorp/precise64):

If we click in a box, we can see which providers the box supports. In this case, we can
use the box with VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, and Hyper-V. It is important to use
boxes that support the provider we are usingnot all boxes support all providers.

Installing new boxes

To install a public box, we use the vagrant box add command, and pass the name
of the box:
vagrant box add hashicorp/precise64

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Chapter 9

The name of the box can either be a URL or file path to an existing box file
(for example, if we have one stored on our network that we wish to use) or
an Atlas box name, like in the preceding command.

Updating existing boxes

One of the key benefits of using Atlas for box discovery is that changes and
versions of these boxes can be managed. If a particular box contains a bug or
security vulnerability, distributors may update their boxes to fix these issues,
or contain new functionality. This can be useful, as it saves us the need to update
our provisioning configuration to make these updates.
When in a Vagrant projects folder, we can run the following command to check for
updates for the projects box and update it:
vagrant box update

This will download the new box; however, we won't see the effect of the new box
unless we destroy our Vagrant machine and rebuild it from the updated box.
If we want to update a specific box, as opposed to the one that is tied to the project
we are in, we can use the box flag to provide the name of the box we want to update:
vagrant box update --box the-box/name

Checking for outdated boxes

We can quickly check to see whether any of the boxes we installed are out of date,
by running the following command:
vagrant box outdated --global

If we omit the global flag, then the command is only within the context of the
current Vagrant project with the flag it relates to all boxes installed:

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HashiCorp Atlas

Distributing boxes
To distribute boxes with Atlas, we need to create an account and log in to the Atlas
website (https://atlas.hashicorp.com/account/new). The username that we
select when registering is used as the prefix for boxes we distributeunless, of
course, we go onto a paid plan, which has organizational support, or we collaborate
with others on a box. Once logged in, we need to click on the Create Box link to go to
the box creation form (https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/new).
On this page, we need to provide a name and description for our box. As we are on
the free plan, we cannot make this a private box, so it will be made public:

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Chapter 9

As the boxes distributed through Atlas can be versioned, to let us roll out new
updates to users of the box, we need to create an initial version for the box, along
with a description of what the version contains:

Next, we need to click on Create new provider to add a new provider that is
supported by this version of the box:

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HashiCorp Atlas

Finally, we specify the provider, and provide a URL to where the box can be
downloaded. With the free version of Atlas, we need to provide a link to the
box, as there is no storage allowance for Vagrant Cloud to host the file for us:

Once a box has been created and published, it can be discovered and installed, as we
discussed in the Discovering boxes section, by the public, or by us using the name of
the box in our Vagrantfile, for example, mkpeacock/testbox.

Sharing and connecting with Atlas

With Atlas, there are three new Vagrant commands at our disposal, which are
as follows:

vagrant connect

vagrant share

vagrant login

Logging Vagrant into Vagrant Cloud

In order to share our Vagrant environment, we need to connect our Vagrant
installation to our Vagrant Cloud account. We can check to see whether this is
already the case by running the following command:
vagrant login --check

This will check to see whether we are already logged in:

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Chapter 9

As we are not logged in, we need to run vagrant login in order to log in. First, we are
prompted for our username or e-mail address from Atlas, and then for our password:

Once logged in, we can use the logout flag to log out of Atlas:
vagrant login --logout

Sharing a Vagrant virtual machine over

HTTP(S)
In order to share the web interface with a Vagrant virtual machine, the virtual
machine must either have its own IP address on our local network or an HTTP(S)
port forwarded from the guest to the host machine. Vagrant requires this so that
your host machine can connect to the relevant port on your virtual machine.

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HashiCorp Atlas

Provided we have either given the virtual machine its own network address or
forward a port to a recognizable HTTP(S) port, then we can run the vagrant share
command to create a public URL for this machine. We can also specify the HTTP and
HTTPS ports that we are using on the virtual machine if Vagrant doesn't detect them
with the --http and --https flags:

After running vagrant share, Vagrant will generate a name and URL to access the
share from. As we are on a free plan, we cannot customize or reserve URLs. Our
terminal session is now locked to run this sharing session, so we need to leave this
running. If we visit the URL in a browser, we should be able to see whatever web
service we are running on our virtual machine:

To stop sharing, we need to close the terminal or stop the vagrant share command
from running:

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Chapter 9

Sharing and connecting to a Vagrant virtual

machine
By default, vagrant share only shares HTTP(S) traffic. We can, however, pass the
--ssh flag to also share SSH access that will allow other Vagrant users to connect to
the machine:
vagrant share --ssh

After running this command, we will be prompted to provide and confirm a

password to be used to encrypt the SSH key so that the users are required to provide
a password when they connect. If required, this can be omitted with the --ssh-nopassword flag instead of --ssh. We can also make a single use SSH connection with
--ssh-once, as shown in the following screenshot:

As with a regular share command, we get a URL and a name. We can prevent
HTTP(S) from being shared by passing the --disable-http flag.

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HashiCorp Atlas

Once the sharing process is running, we can provide the name and password to
whomever we want to be able to connect to the machine. They simply run the
vagrant connect --ssh difficult-elephant-4464 command (where the last
parameter is the name of the connection generated by Atlas) to start a connection
with the machine, and provide the password when prompted:

The user is then logged into the Vagrant machine!

Summary
In this chapter, we learned about the extra functionality offered by the Vagrant
Cloud service.
We discovered how to find third-party Vagrant boxes for use with our projects, how
to check for updates for boxes that use Atlas, and how to distribute our own base
boxes through Atlas. Finally, we looked at authenticating with Atlas to share our
Vagrant environment with our colleagues.
Now that we know more about the functionality offered by Vagrant, we can use it
effectively in our projects!

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Get more information Creating Development Environments with Vagrant

Second Edition

Where to buy this book

You can buy Creating Development Environments with Vagrant Second Edition from the
Packt Publishing website.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet
book retailers.
Click here for ordering and shipping details.

www.PacktPub.com

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