Introduction to Vagrant

Using virtual machines in a development environment has numerous benefits:

Reproducible environment
Management of multiple projects in their restricted environment
Sharing the environment with other teammates
Keeping the development and deployment environments in sync
Running the same VM on different OSes, with a hypervisor like VirtualBox.
Configuring and sharing one VM is easy, but, when we have to deal with multiple VMs
for the same project, doing everything manually can be tiresome. Vagrant by
HashiCorp helps us automate the setup of one or more VMs by providing an end-to-end
lifecycle using the vagrant command line. Vagrant is a cross-platform tool. It can
be installed on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. We have to use different providers,
depending on the OS. It has recently added support for Docker, which can help us
manage Docker containers.

Managing Virtual Machines with Vagrant

Next, let's see how Vagrant helps us manage virtual machines:

Vagrantfile
It is a text file with the Ruby syntax, which has all the information about
configuring and provisioning a set of machines. It has details like the machine
type, image, networking, provider-specific information, provisioner details, etc.
We provide a sample Vagrantfile below:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-

# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
# Every Vagrant development environment requires a box. You can search for
# boxes at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/search.
config.vm.box = "centos/7"

# Create a private network, which allows host-only access to the machine

# using a specific IP.

config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.10"

# config.vm.synced_folder "../data", "/vagrant_data"

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|

# Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
vb.memory = "1024"
end

config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL

yum install vim -y
SHELL
end

The vagrant command reads the configuration given in the configuration file and
does different operations, like up, ssh, destroy, etc. The vagrant command also has
sub-commands like box to manage Box images, rdp to connect to VMs using Remote
Desktop Protocol (RDP), etc. A detailed list of commands is available at its
documentation.
Boxes
We need to provide an image in the Vagrantfile, which we can use to instantiate
machines. In the example above, we have used centos/7 as the base image. If the
image is not available locally, then it can be downloaded from a central repository
like Atlas, which is the image repository provided by HashiCorp. We can version
these images and use them depending on our need, by updating the Vagrantfile
accordingly.
Vagrant Providers
Providers are the underlying engine/hypervisor used to provision a machine. By
default, Vagrant supports VirtualBox, Hyper-V and Docker. We also have custom
providers, like KVM, AWS, etc. VirtualBox is the default provider.
Synced Folders
With the Synced Folder feature, we can sync a directory on the host system with a
VM, which helps the user manage shared files/directories easily. For example, in
the above example, if we un-comment the line below from Vagrantfile, then the
../data folder from the current working directory of the host system would be
shared with the /vagrant_data file on the VM.

# config.vm.synced_folder "../data", "vagrant_data"

Provisioning
Provisioners allow us to automatically install software, make configuration
changes, etc. after the machine is booted. It is a part of the vagrant up process.
There are many types of provisioners available, such as File, Shell, Ansible,
Puppet, Chef, Docker, etc. In the example below, we used Shell as the provisioner
to install the vim package.

config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL

yum install vim -y
SHELL
Plugins
We can use plugins to extend the functionality of Vagrant.

Benefits of Using Vagrant

Some of the benefits of using Vagrant are:

It automates the setup of one or more VMs, which results in saved time and lower
operational costs.
It is a cross-platform tool.
It provides support for Docker, thus helping us manage Docker containers.
It is easy to install.
It is very useful in multi-developer teams.