Usually you have to run vagrant provision from outside your VM to create the VM to begin with. I then do a vagrant ssh to inspect the resultant VM.
If I wish to make small tweaks to the VM (using chef zero recipes in my case), I have to either switch to an other tab that is on my physical host, or exit the SSH session. it would be nice if you could do this run-and-inspect inside the previously created VM.
Why I'm asking: I have too many terminal tabs open for development and am looking for ways to prune, and avoid mental context switching (not to mention trying to figure out which tab is which).
No, you can not run a vagrant provision from inside the same vagrant machine.
Vagrant is running on your host and provisioning the VM according to the specified vagrantfile. Any changes that you want to have applied during the provisioning must somehow come from the vagrantfile.
What you can do is modify a running vagrant machine in any way you want from inside the vagrant machine, and then export the VM using vagrant package to a new vagrant box which then can be used as base for new vagrant VMs.
PS: Not sure how you're dev environment looks like, but I suggest you look into terminal multiplexers like GNU screen or tmux, that might be able to help you with your "tab issues".
Related
I upgraded php to 5.6 within the Vagrant box 'trusty64', and also installed SOAP client. When I next update Vagrant I'm thinking it might overwrite these changes. Would I also need to change the provisioning in the vagrantfile, and if so what should I add?
When I next update Vagrant I'm thinking it might overwrite these
changes.
No, You would not loose anything if you upgrade vagrant. Once the VMs are created, vagrant will operate those VMs and upgrading vagrant will not impact the existing VM.
Basically, it works like this:
- when you run vagrant up, vagrant clone the box (which is VM files) and add the VM to VirtualBox
- after the VM have been created, vagrant "operates" (i.e. start, stop ...) the VirtualBox VM for you
Would I also need to change the provisioning in the vagrantfile
Thats necessary to change the provisioning if you plan to create more VM of this kind, or if you will destroy and recreate this VM; in this case the provisioning will run and you would need to have it updated.
and if so what should I add?
save all the commands you have run to run the upgrade and create a shell script out of it, might be the most simple option. You can also look at more advanced tool (puppet, ansible, chef .... that would do this job)
I have a Cassandra instance running inside virtualbox using vagrant in my windows PC, And my other dev/application settings are in another VM. I don't always need a prompt/UI/CI for the cassandra vm because it's confusing to switch between, is there a way to bring the vagrant without a UI/CI prompt?
Now i'm ding vagrant up
I have Vagrant installed on my iMac but I would also like to install and run it on my MacBook. Is it possible to run the same Vagrant box across two Macs?
I have done a Vagrant up command within a shared Dropbox folder - so i'm guessing that all I need to do is install vagrant on the second mac and then navigate to the Dropbox shared folder and do vagrant up.
Would this work?
Known solution:
ssh to the host machine
user#MacBook: ssh user#imac
then vagrant up; vagrant ssh.
user#imac: vagrant up; vagrant ssh
vagrant#vagrantvm:
This would be the most straight forward way I can think of.
Another option:
RDP to imac and run vagrant up;vagrant ssh as normal
Yet another option:
If your vagrant file is complete enough you should be able to vagrant up on any host to give you the same vagrant env. This relies on your use case but is how I use vagrant.
Vagrant stores the state of the machine and machine id inside the .vagrant folder. The running machine (vm) itself is handled by virtualbox/vmware or any provider your using. Lets say the virtualbox box is stored somewhere else on your system and referenced by Vagrant.
If you access the folder from two systems your basically remote controlling two different machine on two different systems. Not a good solution. Furthermore, you will run into problems if the states are different, e.g. its "up" on system one but "destroyed" on system two.
Additionally to the above solutions I propose the following:
Vagrant Share! Enable Vagrant http-/ssh-Share between your systems.
Vagrant machines should be repeatable and destroyable. Therefore, put your Vagrantfile under version control and checkout on the two systems.
Configure your provider to store the box itself on the dropbox.
The question is basically in the title, but to expound a little: I've got a puppet manifest that runs on startup in our development Vagrant VMs. I'd like to add a couple things that make life easier for our developers -- things like bouncing Apache when our source files change or rebuilding our translation files when the master file is changed.
All of that seems simple enough to do, but I'm not sure whether it's possible to make the puppet service continue to monitor the machine after the VM is provisioned, and the Vagrant documentation doesn't seem to mention it.
Provisioning is a part of the vagrant up process, once the VM is up and running, it's finished.
NOTE: Provisioners in Vagrant allow you to automatically install software, alter configurations, and more on the machine as part of the vagrant up process.
I am NOT an expert on Puppet (Chef user), I think to bounce Apache if config files are changed, you may need an agent running on the VM.
BTW: vagrant provision can be used to run updated Chef cookbooks or Puppet modules after the VM is up.
Update
Since Vagrant 1.3.0 (released Sep 5, 2013)
vagrant up will now only run provisioning by default the first time it is run. Subsequent reload or up will need to explicitly specify the --provision flag to provision. [GH-1776]
See change log => https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
I am just starting with Vagrant and I am having a little trouble understanding a few details. I have read through the docs but still am missing a basic concept. When I want to start a Vagrant box I run:
vagrant up
This will "build the VM based on the box" I understand that the boxes are stored at ~/.vagrant.d and in fact I have packaged up my own box from a base Ubuntu box. However, when I run vagrant up and start to add files to the vm, where is the virtual hard drive for the vm stored? For example, when I run apt-get install apache2 and the root system is modified, where is this modified?
When I do a du on my current directory I do not see any changes. I also do not see any changes in the ~/.vagrant.d directory. However, I can do vagrant halt, restart my local machine and then run vagrant up again and the changes are persisted somewhere.
vagrant up also reports
[default] VM already created. Booting if its not already running...
Can someone tell me where the VM is created and where the changes are made?
Vagrant imports the base box which is located at ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/, like you said.
This is where the base boxes are kept. It uses it to start a VM from the clean state. When importing a VM, the responsibility of where to store data files and VM state is up to VirtualBox itself. This is a configurable location but typically defaults to ~/VirtualBox\ VMS for Mac OS X and Linux. In Windows the boxes are kept in %userprofile%\.vagrant.d\boxes
It is easy to find the place where they are getting created, regardless of what platform you happen to be using.
1. Start VirtualBox.
2. Go to the VM that shows as running instance.
3. Check out the Settings ->Storage.
4. You can find the path to location where VMs are created and stored in your file system.
I always change the directory that Virtualbox uses by default for VMs. Normally it is in your profile folder in Windows.
I change it to something like "D:\VHDs\VBox\" and there I found my vagrant test vm: "test01_1347456065". It was called test01, so I guess vagrant adds the numbers to keep things unique.