What is Vagrant? Taken directly from the vendors website:
Vagrant provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team.
For more details about how Vagrant can be beneficial, I strongly encourage you to read the vendors website at:
https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/why-vagrant
Vagrant can be somewhat difficult to understand without seeing it in action. But in summary, building test servers can take a long time. With vagrant, you can run your test servers with a few simple commands so you can begin performing the tests that you wanted to get done without the wait. The environments are portable, so its very easy to share with colleagues.
All Vagrant does is communicate with providers of your choice such as VirtualBox, AWS, Rackspace Cloud, etc, and spins up the boxes using the respective providers API’s.
Installation
Installing Vagrant with VirtualBox is simple and easy on most desktop OS’s running Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. Simply use the links below to download and install both VirtualBox and Vargrant on your desktop:
Known working versions
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds_5_0
https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/1.8.4/ **
** Vagrant v1.8.5 currently has issues with CentOS. Therefore, use v1.8.4 for now. Once v1.8.6 comes out, the bug should be addressed.
Once you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed on your desktop, you are ready to begin deploying your test servers.
Getting familiar with Vagrant
Some quick terms you need to know:
Vagrantfile: This is the main configuration file for your test server.
Provider: Which API are we using? AWS, Rackspace Cloud, VirtualBox, etc.
Vagrant Boxes: This is the Vagrant base image. Think of it as your golden template that is used to deploy your test servers.
To manage your individual environments or test servers, you simply create the directory on your desktop, and tell Vagrant to deploy the OS to that individual directory.
An example of some of the test environments on my workstation are:
/home/user/vagrant/centos6 /home/user/vagrant/ubuntu1404 /home/user/vagrant/centos6-lamp-environment
Most of the common distro’s used today have official boxes available. I included puppetlabs as they have images that are up to date with base images as well as boxes with Puppet Enterprise already installed:
https://atlas.hashicorp.com/centos
https://atlas.hashicorp.com/ubuntu
https://atlas.hashicorp.com/debian
https://atlas.hashicorp.com/freebsd
https://atlas.hashicorp.com/puppetlabs
Quick start to see Vagrant in action
This is just a quick way to see Vagrant in action. It is important to remember that all the vagrant commands apply to whatever directory you are in on your desktop!
First, create the directory on your desktop for your test server:
[user@workstation ~]# mkdir -p vagrant/centos6-test [user@workstation ~]# cd vagrant/centos6-test
Now initialize a Vagrantfile, which tells Vagrant what image to use, and how to configure it:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant init centos/6
Then startup the test server:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant up
And thats it! You can now log into your test server and get to work by running:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant ssh
Once your done with your testing, you can remove the test server by running:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant destroy
Command commands
These commands are to be ran from inside the directory of your project.
To check the status of a single test server:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant status
If you made changes to your Vagrantfile and need to reload your settings:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant reload
If you want to shutdown a test server, but you don’t want to destroy it:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant halt
To check the status of all your test servers:
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant global-status
How to customize your test server
What makes Vagrant powerful is the Vagrantfile that resides in each directory for your test servers. This file allows you to specify IP’s, set users and passwords, run bootstrap scripts, or even spin up multiple servers from one file. This greatly speeds up the provisioning time so you can focus on testing what you truly needed to test.
The examples below are full examples of the Vagrantfile you can copy in your projects directory to spin up test servers.
Here is an example for spinning up a Ubuntu 12.04 server, and having Apache already installed:
[user@workstation ~]# mkdir vagrant/ubuntu1204-test01
[user@workstation ~]# cd vagrant/ubuntu1204-test01
[user@workstation ~]# vim Vagrantfile
config.vm.box = "hashicorp/precise32"
config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apache2
SHELL
end
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant up
Below is an example for spinning up a CentOS 6 server with the private IP address of 172.16.0.2, accessible only to your workstation:
[user@workstation ~]# mkdir vagrant/ubuntu1204-test01 [user@workstation ~]# cd vagrant/ubuntu1204-test01 [user@workstation ~]# vim Vagrantfile Vagrant.configure(2) do |config| config.vm.box = "centos/6" config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "172.16.0.2" end [user@workstation ~]# vagrant up
Below is an example for spinning up a CentOS 6 server with the public IP address of 123.123.123.123, accessible by anyone:
[user@workstation ~]# mkdir vagrant/ubuntu1204-test01 [user@workstation ~]# cd vagrant/ubuntu1204-test01 [user@workstation ~]# vim Vagrantfile Vagrant.configure(2) do |config| config.vm.box = "centos/6" config.vm.network "public_network", ip: "123.123.123.123" end [user@workstation ~]# vagrant up
Below is an example for spinning up a CentOS 6 server with Puppet Enterprise, with the private IP address of 10.1.0.3, and adding a bootstrap.sh file that we'll use for automatically our build process to install and configure Nginx:
[user@workstation ~]# mkdir vagrant/centos6-puppet-server01
[user@workstation ~]# cd vagrant/centos6-puppet-server01
[user@workstation ~]# vim Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
config.vm.box = "puppetlabs/centos-6.6-64-puppet"
config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "10.1.0.3"
config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 80
config.vm.provision :shell, path: "bootstrap.sh"
end
[user@workstation ~]# vim bootstrap.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Sanity checks
if [ ! `whoami` = root ]; then
echo "This script must be ran by the user: root"
exit 1
fi
# CentOS specific tasks:
if [ -f /etc/redhat-release ]; then
selinux=`getenforce`
if [ $selinux = "Enforcing" ]; then
setenforce 0
fi
if [ `cat /etc/redhat-release | grep "Linux release 7" | wc -l` = 1 ]; then
yum -y install iptables-services
fi
fi
# Install required Puppet modules from the forge
puppet module install puppetlabs-stdlib
puppet module install jfryman-nginx
puppet module install puppetlabs-firewall
# General default.pp for Puppet
cat << EOF > /root/default.pp
class { 'nginx': }
nginx::resource::vhost { 'example.com':
www_root => '/var/www/example.com',
}
package { 'git':
ensure => present,
}
firewall { '000 accept all icmp':
proto => 'icmp',
action => 'accept',
}
firewall { '100 allow SSH':
port => [22],
proto => tcp,
action => accept,
}
firewall { '101 allow http over port 80':
port => [80],
proto => tcp,
action => accept,
}
EOF
# Execute first run of default.pp
puppet apply /root/default.pp
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant up
Below is an example for spinning up 2x CentOS 6 server with private IP addresses, accessible only to your workstation, both with 1G of memory, and installing MySQL on the db server, and Apache/PHP on the web server:
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
config.vm.define "db01" do |db01|
db01.vm.box = "centos/6"
db01.vm.hostname = "web01.example.com"
db01.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.100"
db01.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
sudo yum update
sudo yum install -y mysql
SHELL
db01.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.gui = false
vb.memory = "1024"
end
end
config.vm.define "web01" do |web01|
web01.vm.box = "centos/6"
web01.vm.hostname = "web02.example.com"
web01.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.101"
web01.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.gui = false
vb.memory = "1024"
end
web01.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
sudo yum update
sudo yum install -y httpd php
SHELL
end
end
[user@workstation ~]# vagrant up