I really like using vagrant on my laptop to test things out as it is so simple to spin up test machines, a few things have changed recently.
If you are using this on a Mac, the default place for you files are ~/.vagrant.d/boxes, always good to store the machines in a separate directory depending on the project you are working on. I use this along with virtual box, this does the spinning up you don't actually interface with it
The first thing before you can download the boxes etc you need to create an account, the website for all the information and to be able to create an account is - https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrant-cloud/
Once you have your account login, from the command line type
vagrant login
From here you put in all your login details then you are good to go to download the boxes you want.
I use centos when testing somethings, so I type vagrant box add centos/7. You may find this link helpful - https://www.vagrantup.com/intro/getting-started/boxes.html
Once you know you have the box downloaded, you are ready to start to fire up your first box. You should create a directory, call it test_server1, change into that directory and initialise the machine.
mkdir test_server1 cd test_server1 vagrant init
This will then create you a basic Vagrantfile, this is like the main config file for the server, there are many things you can change in here when provisioning the machine, for now let's leave it as it is and start the machine, from the command line type vagrant up.
This will build and start the machine up.
Once the machine has been started you can connect to the machine by typing vagrant ssh. Now you are at the prompt of the linux machine, now you can play until your heart is content.
Once you have several machines running from the one directory, there is a simple way to check the status of those, switch to the directory and type
MacBook-Air:appdb $ vagrant status Current machine states: app1 poweroff (virtualbox) app2 poweroff (virtualbox) db poweroff (virtualbox) This environment represents multiple VMs. The VMs are all listed above with their current state. For more information about a specific VM, run `vagrant status NAME`.
To stop a machine, while you are in the directory you can type vagrant halt. This will power the machine off.
If you want to check the status of all of the machines you have
If you wanted to check the status of all the vagrant machines on your box you can use vagrant global-status, this shows ALL machines and their statuses MacBook-Air:appdb $ vagrant global-status id name provider state directory ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 900ab57 default virtualbox poweroff /Users/ansible-book 5427642 default virtualbox running /Users/.vagrant.d/boxes 2f4e5dc default virtualbox poweroff /Users/.vagrant.d/boxes/test1 0a42ded default virtualbox poweroff /Users/.vagrant.d/boxes/test2 d2d82e0 default virtualbox poweroff /Users/.vagrant.d/boxes/centos 90ae4e5 app1 virtualbox poweroff /Users/.vagrant.d/boxes/appdb a1f117a app2 virtualbox poweroff /Users/.vagrant.d/boxes/appdb 481b13d db virtualbox poweroff /Users/.vagrant.d/boxes/appdb The above shows information about all known Vagrant environments on this machine. This data is cached and may not be completely up-to-date. To interact with any of the machines, you can go to that directory and run Vagrant, or you can use the ID directly with Vagrant commands from any directory. For example: "vagrant destroy 1a2b3c4d”
We will continue this week with some ways you can change IP addresses of the machines of test ansible scripts, anything in particular you want to see?
I am always interested in your thoughts so if you have any comments or feedback then please feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me here.
