Vagrant

Create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. Vagrant is a tool for managing virtual machines via a simple to use command line interface.

Prerequisite

You'll need homebrew-cask, if you don't have it refer to this section.

Installation

Vagrant uses Virtualbox to manage the virtual dependencies. You can directly download virtualbox and install or use Homebrew for it. Notice that macOS High Sierra 10.13 introduces a new feature that requires user approval before loading new third-party kernel extensions. In case of failure follow the instructions here.

brew install --cask virtualbox

Now install Vagrant either from the website or use Homebrew for installing it.

brew install --cask vagrant

Vagrant-Manager helps you manage all your virtual machines in one place directly from the menu bar.

brew install --cask vagrant-manager

Usage

Add the Vagrant box you want to use. We'll use Ubuntu 12.04 for the following example.

vagrant box add precise64 https://vagrantcloud.com/hashicorp/boxes/precise64/versions/1.1.0/providers/virtualbox.box

You can find more boxes at Vagrant Cloud.

Now create a test directory and cd into the test directory. Then we'll initialize the vagrant machine.

vagrant init precise64

Now lets start the machine using the following command.

vagrant up

You can ssh into the machine now.

vagrant ssh

Halt the vagrant machine now.

vagrant halt

Other useful commands are suspend and destroy.