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.
Related
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".
I've tried two things:
First, I tried to install virtualbox on a EC2 machine, which proved to be impossible.
Second, I was able to install both vagrant and virtualbox on a Digital Ocean droplet, but when I tried to run vagrant up, it got stuck on Booting VM.
Several sources on Internet say that it is not possible to run a VM inside a virtualized environment (both Amazon and Digital Ocean provide this).
Is there any way I can solve this with another provider, or is there a way to run vagrant/virtualbox in Amazon or Digital Ocean?
Install VirtualBox and Vagrant on a physical machine such as your desktop
Run the 3 commands from the command line:
vagrant init somenameyoumakeup file://urlToYour.box
vagrant up
vagrant halt
Open the VirtualBox UI
Export the Virtual machine to OVA format using the File -> Export menu
Follow the guide here for importing an OVA: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vm-import/
I'm just getting started with using VirtualBox. I'm trying to do all my work GUI free, i.e. only using iTerm2, and want to work with different VM's command terminal's via Vagrant. So my questions are:
How or what is the process/command to add different VM's to my VirtualBox that are each using the vagrant feature?
When starting vagrant using the command: vagrant up, how do i specify which VM i want to use?
I have looked at different explanations, e.g. the vagrant and virtualbox websites, but they seem a bit too specific to a certain case. My employer already setup Debian successfully and it is compatible with vagrant but I am not exactly sure how that was done or what the folder locations mean.
I have two hosts, one Windows and one Linux, both with Vagrant and VMware Workstation installed and everything works perfectly fine in their own environment. However, when I create an guest VM in Linux and I do vagrant up in Windows, then Vagrant will delete(!) everything in the .vagrant directory and attempt to fetch the base image. The same thing happens if I do a vagrant init and vagrant up in Windows and then a vagrant up in Linux. How do I prevent this from happening? Is there anyway to share the same VMs between Windows and Linux using Vagrant?
I'm running Windows 7, Ubuntu 14.04, Vagrant 1.6.5, VMware Workstation 10.0.3. This problem occurs for all guest operating systems.
The content of the .vagrant directory can be OS specific, and the internal state of VMware for sure.
I don't think there is easy way to share the same VM instance between the two hosts. The Vagrant way is to provision the VM so you only share the base box and then each user/OS spins up their own instance.
Another option would be to use vagrant package and vagrant box add to transfer the configured box, but that doesn't work with the VMware provider.
Yet another approach would be to use a cloud provider like AWS or Digital Ocean and just ssh into the box. Or maybe even use the vagrant-managed-servers plugin. Your question didn't hint what you use the Vagrant VM for, so it's difficult to tell what would be the best solution.
The following has been tested using the VirtualBox Vagrant provider with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 in a dual boot setup with a shared NTFS drive where D:\ in Windows is accesible as /mnt/d/ in Linux.
First (but not indispensable if I'm not wrong), set the VAGRANT_HOME environment variable in both Windows and Linux to the same place, e.g.:
Windows, D:\.vagrant.d
Linux, /mnt/d/.vagrant.d
Then create a new machine from one of the OSes, from Linux in the following example:
$ cd /mnt/d/vagrant_machines/machine1
$ vagrant init
$ vagrant up
Then boot in Windows and first backup D:\vagrant_machines\machine1\.vagrant just in case case its contents get accidentally deleted.
Then register from VirtualBox the existing VM, e.g. D:\virtualbox_machines\machine1_default_1587262647987_91775\machine1_default_1587262647987_91775.vbox.
Then run the following:
>vagrant.exe status
The VirtualBox VM was created with a user that doesn't match the
current user running Vagrant. VirtualBox requires that the same user
be used to manage the VM that was created. Please re-run Vagrant with
that user. This is not a Vagrant issue.
The UID used to create the VM was: 1000
Your UID is: 0
And update D:\vagrant_machines\machine1\.vagrant\machines\default\virtualbox\creator_uid to your current UID (0 in this example).
Then start the machine:
>vagrant status
>vagrant up
Finally, note that you will require to update the creator_uid each time that you switch OSes, which you might want to automate.
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.