Vagrant

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

Before you start

In order to simplify the installation process you should install homebrew-cask which provides a friendly homebrew-style CLI workflow for the administration of Mac applications distributed as binaries. Refer to this article in order to install homebrew-cask.

Install

Vagrant uses Virtualbox to manage the virtual dependencies. You can directly download virtualbox and install or use homebrew for it.

$ brew cask install virtualbox

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

$ brew cask install vagrant

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

$ brew cask install 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 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.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, destroy etc.