Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Developing locally in Linux boxes using Vagrant, vagrant-vbguest, and VirtualBox


If you have read many of my previous entries, I’m sure you are aware that Linux is my primary development environment. For local development projects I use Vagrant and VirtualBox so that I’m able to quickly and easily make use of a variety of Linux distros (CentOS 7, Ubuntu LTS, and sometimes Debian). While I use these tools almost daily in Windows, they are fully supported under OS X and Linux as well.

Vagrant

Vagrant deserves a longer article of its own, so I’ll keep this brief. Simply put Vagrant creates and configures a variety of virtual development providers using any number of virtualization backend including local hypervisors, the cloud, or even containers. With Vagrant installed I can bring up a new Linux development environment with just two commands.

VirtualBox

Many are probably already familiar with Oracle’s excellent VirtualBox virtualization product. For running local Linux development images, I find that VirtualBox 5 meets all my requirements and provides favorable performance to competitors with the added bonus of being free for all purposes (The separate VirtualBox Extension Pack is only free for non-commercial use, however I do not normally utilize its features regardless).

vagrant-vbguest

The missing “glue” to make using Vagrant and VirtualBox together even easier. The vagrant-vbguest plugin for Vagrant automatically updates the guest additions for Linux guests, making it even simpler to create and update new Linux development boxes and/or update VirtualBox itself. The recent release of vagrant-vbguest version 0.12 was one of the impetuses for this post, and I’m pleased to mention that yours truly is credited with the first fix in the changelog: https://github.com/dotless-de/vagrant-vbguest/blob/v0.12.0/CHANGELOG.md

Getting Started

Installation

Install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Install Vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
Install vagrant-vbguest:

‘vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbugest’

Provision and Start your Linux development box

In a new dedicated folder:

vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64
vagrant up --provider virtualbox

While the box is usable now, I normally recommend a box reload on first run to load any new kernels or kernel modules.

vagrant reload

Enter your new Linux development box

vagrant ssh

Congratulations!

You are now using your new Linux Development box. When you are complete exit like normal. The image can be suspended and restart/accessed with ‘vagrant halt’ and then ‘vagrant up && vagrant ssh’. When your done with the image ‘vagrant destroy’ will remove all traces. Additional options to configure your box can be found in the 'Vagrantfile' created in the directory you initialized the box. I frequently increase the memory allocation and number of virtual cpus, but customization to the network or even startup scripts are easily available.

The ‘vagrant’ command has a large number of other useful functions, so I encourage you to check them out. I used trusty64 in the example above, but plenty of additional prebuilt box images can be found at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search including popular Debian 8, Ubuntu LTS, and CentOS 7 boxes.

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