The remainder of this getting started guide is written as a walkthrough. As the reader, you are encouraged to follow along with the samples on your own personal computer. Since Vagrant works with virtual machines, there will be no “cruft” left over if you ever wish to stop (no extraneous software, files, etc) as Vagrant will handle destroying the virtual machine if you so choose.
The first step for any project which uses Vagrant is to mark the root directory and setup the basic required files. Vagrant provides a handy command-line utility for just that. In the terminal transcript below, we create the directory for our project and initialize it for Vagrant:
$ mkdir vagrant_guide
$ cd vagrant_guide
$ vagrant init
vagrant init creates an initial Vagrantfile. For now, we’ll leave this Vagrantfile as-is, but it will be used extensively in future steps to configure our virtual machine.
With Vagrant now ready for the given directory, let’s create a quick “web project” which we’ll use later to showcase your VM. Run the following command in your project directory (the directory with the Vagrantfile):
$ echo "<h1>Hello from a Vagrant VM</h1>" > index.html
The above steps could have been run in any order. Vagrant can easily be initialized in pre-existing project folders.
To keep this getting started guide as simple and as general as possible, we use an HTML-based project as an example, but Vagrant doesn't make any assumptions about the type of project you're developing. It should be clear after going through the getting started guide that Vagrant is usable with any type of web project.