This initial section will introduce the binaries and Vagrantfile, which are used extensively in controlling Vagrant. The remainder of the getting started guides assumes this basic knowledge.
Once Vagrant is installed, it is typically controlled through the vagrant command line interface. The vagrant binary has many “subcommands” which can be invoked which handle all the functionality within Vagrant, such as vagrant up, vagrant ssh, and vagrant package, to name a few. To discover all the supported subcommands, just run vagrant alone, and it’ll list them out for you.
A Vagrantfile is to Vagrant as a Makefile is to Make. The Vagrantfile exists at the root of any Vagrant project and is used to configure and specify the behavior of Vagrant and the virtual machine it creates. A basic Vagrantfile is embedded below so you can get a brief idea of how it looks:
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
# Setup the box
config.vm.box = "my_box"
end
As you can see, a Vagrantfile is simply Ruby code which typically contains a Vagrant configuration block. For most commands, Vagrant will first load the project’s Vagrantfile for configuration.