Testing your cloud infrastructure and deployment scripts before you actually provision servers and deploy code is a good idea. Vagrant makes this easy.
In order to use vagrant you will need to have VirtualBox installed. Once you've completed that you'll need to install Vagrant. Note: it is better to run the binary version of Vagrant. If you have a gem version, uninstall it, then []download it](http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads):
You can download and install a default box or you can start with a good Vagrantfile and use that to fetch the box you want. In your Rails root create a file called Vagrantfile:
# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
# By default, I am using ubuntu because I prefer it
# Lots of people use centos instead
config.vm.box = "ubuntu"
# Specifying the url means that if the box is not installed
# Vagrant knows where to get it. Here I am using a 64-bit
# version of 14.04 LTS (long-term support)
config.vm.box_url = "http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/trusty/current/trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant-disk1.box"
# Some basic config for later
config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080
config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 2048]
end
end
Now, you could have created this with vagrant init and that would give you a much better template with all of the options and documentation. Once you've got Vagrant and a Vagrantfile, you are going to need to start the box (this can take a while):
vagrant up
Great, you should now have a running vagrant box. You can run vagrant ssh to test it. If you want to shut that box down:
vagrant halt
This box is pretty boring at the moment.
Now we need to prepare the box (which will setup chef and ruby)