Vagrant Help Guide

This blog post is about setting up a vagrant box. Vagrants are useful to preserve the app-configurations and easy to maintain. Once the vagrant is setup one can create a package out of it; which can be used as an independent system with the app-configurations. Once a package is ready we can use it directly, we don’t have to remember the gemset OR rvm etc. While sharing the APP we can simply share the package file and all others can start using it directly.

Pre-requisites:

• Install VirtualBox
• Install ‘vagrant’ gem

1. Steps to setup a vagrant box

1. Download one of the vagrant box from the list available at lucid32.box
2. Use that box to setup vagrant for your application $ vagrant box add blog ~/Downloads/lucid32.box
3. Initialize the vagrant box added $ vagrant init blog This will create a Vagrantfile in your project-directory
4. Verify the Vagrantfile It should have a line with configuration ` config.vm.box = “blog” `
5. Start vagrant $ vagrant up
6. Connect to vagrant Once the vagrant is up successfully, try connecting it using ssh command $ vagrant ssh This will connect us to the vagrant shell prompt
7. Usual steps to setup all configuration required for our Application From this step on, follow the steps to setup a ubuntu machine for “ruby, rails, mysql” etc. environment
8. Create vagrant-package.box

  $ vagrant halt (stop the vagrant, before packaging it)
  $ vagrant package

It creates default package.box file in the current directory

2. How to use package.box created out of Vagrant

1) Go to your project directory and run

$ vagrant box add my_box /path/to/the/package.box
$ vagrant init my_box

2) Edit the “Vagrantfile” created at project directory, with below line From : #config.vm.forward_port 80, 8080 To: config.vm.forward_port 3000, 3000 3) Running it

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
$ cd /vagrant

4) Ready to use From this step on start using it as usual terminal to start your rails server i.e. rails server OR ./script/server

References:

RailsCasts Episode-292