Commands

After installation, you can use the vagrant command in your terminal application to create, provision, start, stop, and destroy VirtualBox virtual machines. These are the Vagrant commands you’ll use most often:

vagrant init

This creates a new Vagrantfile configurations script in the current working directory. We use this script to configure a virtual machine’s properties and provisioning details.

vagrant up

This creates and/or starts a virtual machine.

vagrant provision

This provisions a virtual machine using the specified provisioning scripts. We’ll discuss provisioning later in this chapter.

vagrant ssh

This logs you into a virtual machine via SSH.

vagrant halt

This stops a virtual machine.

vagrant destroy

This destroys a virtual machine.

alias vi="vagrant init"
alias vu="sudo echo 'Starting VM' && vagrant up"
alias vup="sudo echo 'Starting VM' && vagrant up --provision"
alias vp="vagrant provision"
alias vh="vagrant halt"
alias vs="vagrant ssh"

Boxes

We have VirtualBox and Vagrant installed. Now what? We need to choose a Vagrant box as a starting point for our virtual machine. A Vagrant box is a preconfigured virtual machine that provides a foundation on which we provision our server and build our PHP application. Some boxes are spartan shells used as a blank canvas. Other boxes include complete software stacks that cater to certain types of applications. You can browse available boxes at https://vagrantcloud.com.

I usually choose the spartan ubuntu/trusty64 box, and then I use Puppet to provision the box with a specific software stack required by my application. If you find another Vagrant box that already includes the tools you need, by all means use that box to save time.

Initialize

After you find a Vagrant box, navigate into the appropriate working directory with your terminal application. Initialize a new Vagrantfile with this command:

vagrant init

Open the new Vagrantfile file in your preferred text editor. This file is written with Ruby, but it’s easy to read. Find the config.vm.box setting, and change its value to the name of your Vagrant box. For example, if I prefer the Ubuntu box I change this setting to ubuntu/trusty64. The updated Vagrantfile line should read:

config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"

Next, uncomment this line so we can access our virtual machine in a web browser on our local network at IP address 192.168.33.10:

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

Finally, create the virtual machine with this command:

vagrant up

This command downloads the remote Vagrant box (if necessary), and it creates a new VirtualBox virtual machine based on the Vagrant box.

Provision

Unless you use a Vagrant box that provides a preconfigured software stack, your virtual machine doesn’t do anything. You need to provision the virtual machine with the software to run your PHP application. At the very least, you want a web server, PHP, and possibly a database. Provisioning a virtual machine is a topic far too large for this book. I can, however, point you in the right direction. You can provision a virtual machine with Vagrant and either Puppet or Chef. Both Puppet and Chef can be enabled and configured in the the Vagrantfile configuration file.

config.vm.provision "puppet" do |puppet|
  puppet.manifests_path = "manifests"
  puppet.manifest_file  = "default.pp"
end

config.vm.provision "chef_solo" do |chef|
  chef.cookbooks_path = "../my-recipes/cookbooks"
  chef.roles_path = "../my-recipes/roles"
  chef.data_bags_path = "../my-recipes/data_bags"
  chef.add_recipe "mysql"
  chef.add_role "web"

  # You may also specify custom JSON attributes:
  chef.json = { mysql_password: "foo" }
end

Synced folders

In either case, it’s often useful to map your local machine’s project directory to a directory in the virtual machine. For example, you can map your local project directory to the virtual machine’s /var/www directory. If the virtual machine’s web server virtual host is /var/www/public, your local project’s public/ directory is now served by the virtual machine’s web server. Any local changes are reflected immediately in the virtual machine. You can uncomment this line in your Vagrantfile file to enable synced directories between your local and virtual machines:

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

The first argument (.) is your local path relative to the Vagrantfile configuration file. The second argument (/vagrant_data) is the absolute path on the virtual machine to which the local directory is mapped. The virtual machine directory largely depends on your virtual machine’s web server virtual host configuration. OS X users should enable NFS synced folders. Change the config.vm.synced_folder line to this:

config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant_data", type: "nfs"

Then uncomment these lines and boost the VirtualBox machine’s memory to 1024MB:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
  # Don't boot with headless mode
  # vb.gui = true

  # Use VBoxManage to customize the VM. For example to change memory:
  vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "1024"]
end

Get started

Puppet and Chef are not easy to learn, especially for Vagrant newcomers. There are tools available to help you get started with Vagrant that don’t require you to write your own Puppet and Chef manifests.

PuPHPet

PuPHPet is ideal for those who don’t know how to write Puppet manifests. This is a point-and-click website that creates a Puppet configuration automatically (Figure B-2). You download the resultant Puppet configuration and run vagrant up. It really is that simple.

Figure B-2. PuPHPet