Vagrant uses Oracle’s VirtualBox to build configurable, lightweight, and portable virtual machines dynamically. The first couple of pages serve to introduce you to Vagrant and what it has to offer while the rest of the guide is a technical walkthrough for building a fully functional web development environment. The getting started guide concludes by explaining how to package the newly created vagrant environment so other developers can get up and running in just a couple commands.
Vagrant depends on Oracle’s VirtualBox to create all of its virtual environments. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is a professional-quality virtualization solution that is also open source software. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris.
Here is a link directly to the download page.
Vagrant currently supports VirtualBox 4.0.x, 4.1.x and 4.2.x.
To install Vagrant, download the appropriate package or installer from the downloads page, and install it using standard operating system procedures. On Windows and Mac OS X, the vagrant command should automatically be placed on your PATH. On other systems, you must add /opt/vagrant/bin to your PATH.
If a Vagrant package is not available for your platform, you can also install using RubyGems via a gem install vagrant. But note that the packages are the preferred and best supported method of installation.
$ vagrant box add lucid32 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box $ vagrant init lucid32 $ vagrant up
While the rest of the getting started guide will focus on explaining how to build a fully functional virtual machine to serve Rails applications, you should get used to the above snippet of code. After the initial setup of any Vagrant environment, the above is all any developer will need to create their development environment! Note that the above snippet does actually create a fully functional 512MB virtual machine running Ubuntu in the background, although the machine doesn’t do much in this state.