Vagrant tutorial

1. What is Vagrant?
2. Installation
3. Project setup
4. Boxes
5. What is PuPHPet?
6. How to save your changes on a box?
7. Resources

In this tutorial you will learn how to quickly use Vagrant for PHP development.

What is Vagrant?

Vagrant is a wrapper around the virtualization software such as VirtualBox for configuring and creating virtual development environments. Perfect for PHP development. You can have a development environment that is identical to your production environment. So far you’ve probably used setups like Xampp, Wampserver or similar all-in-one package that contained PHP, MySQL and Apache on your development machine. That is all fine but with Vagrant you will become more flexible and you can share your development environment with your teammates.

Installation

Before installing Vagrant, you must install a virtualization software such as VirtualBox. Installation of Vagrant is very simple and works on all popular operating systems - Windows, Mac and Linux. Download Vagrant or install it with package manager for your Linux distribution.

Project setup

All the commands in this tutorial must be typed in your terminal:

$ mkdir vagrant-project
$ cd vagrant-project

Boxes

Boxes in Vagrant are base images of virtual machines.

With command vagrant init you get a Vagrant configuration file called Vagrantfile with instructions for Vagrant to set up your development environment and a so called base box.

Next step after creating Vagrantfile is adding a box. In this tutorial we’ll use Puphpet’s Debian box. Don’t let the name confuse you - it is the latest Debian box.

$ vagrant box add puphpet/debian75-x64

This downloads the base image you can use in your development environment.

To ssh into your newly added box, use the following commands:

• vagrant up starts your vagrant box. It’s equivalent to hitting the “Power ON” button on your physical machine.

$ vagrant up

• Once the box is up, it can accept SSH connections. By default SSH will be passwordless and is configured to key pairs.

$ vagrant ssh

What is PuPHPet?

PuPHPet is a simple GUI to set up virtual machines for Web development.

How to save your changes on a box?

When you make some changes on the box you’ve downloaded in previous steps, you will lose them when you make:

$ vagrant destroy

In order to save the entire box you can make a new box based on the current running virtual machine. This creates a package named package.box:

$ vagrant package --output package.box

You can than add this package to your base boxes:

$ vagrant box add your_name/distribution package.box

And use it like before:

$ vagrant init your_name/distribution

See also

• Vagrantup - Vagrant’s official homepage
• Vagrant Boxes - list of base boxes for Vagrant
• Vagrant Cloud - hosting and discovery of Vagrant Boxes, as well as other features like Vagrant Share
• Puphpet homepage - GUI for setting up virtual machines for web development