Networking and Provisioning

Provision a Virtual Machine

  • 3min

  • Vagrant

Vagrant allows you to automatically provision environments, including web servers. Before automatic provisioning, you would SSH into your guest machine and install a webserver. This process was manual and would need to be repeated every time you shut down and brought this environment back up. Vagrant automatically installs software when you use vagrant up so that the guest machine can be repeatably created and ready-to-use.

In this tutorial, you will serve local files using a webserver on a guest machine.

Prerequisites

VMware Fusion: There is an additional plugin and configuration required, review the documentation for guidance. Also, note that it is in tech preview for Apple Silicon.

Create an HTML directory

On your local machine, create a directory from where Apache will serve your content.

$ mkdir html

Next, create the file index.html in the new directory with the contents for the index page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <h1>Get started with Vagrant!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Write a provisioning script

Set up Apache with a shell script. Create the following shell script and save it as bootstrap.sh in the same directory as your Vagrantfile.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

apt-get update
apt-get install -y apache2
if ! [ -L /var/www ]; then
  rm -rf /var/www
  ln -fs /vagrant /var/www
fi

This script downloads and starts Apache, and creates a symlink between your synced files directory and the location where Apache will look for content to serve.

Configure Vagrant

Next, edit the Vagrantfile to use the script when you provision the environment. 

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "hashicorp/bionic64"
  config.vm.provision :shell, path: "bootstrap.sh"
end

The provision line configures Vagrant to use the shell provisioner to set up the machine with the bootstrap.sh file. The file path is relative to the location of the project root which should be the location of the Vagrantfile.

Deploy the webserver

Use vagrant up to create your machine and have Vagrant automatically provision it. 

$ vagrant up

Verify deployment

After Vagrant completes provisioning, the web server will be active. You cannot see the website from your own browser yet, but you can verify that the provisioning works by loading a file from within the machine.

SSH into the guest machine.

$ vagrant ssh

Now get the HTML file that was created during provisioning.

vagrant@vagrant:~$ wget -qO- 127.0.0.1
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <h1>Get started with Vagrant!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

This works because in the shell script above you installed Apache and setup the default DocumentRoot of Apache to point to your /vagrant directory, which is the default synced folder setup by Vagrant.

Continue to the next tutorial where you will forward a port on your guest machine so that you can access the website that the guest machine is serving.

Logout of your SSH session.

vagrant@vagrant:~$ logout
Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.

Next Steps

For complex provisioning scripts, it may be more efficient to package a custom Vagrant box with those packages pre-installed instead of building them each time. Learn more in the packaging custom boxes documentation.

You have successfully provisioned your first virtual machine with Vagrant. Read on to learn about networking.

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