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Mario García
Mario García

Posted on • Updated on

Virtual Dev Environment with Vagrant + VBox on Linux

#linux #tutorial

On my computer I have an Arch-based distribution installed. These days I'm using EndeavourOS but I've used Arch Linux and Manjaro as well.

I have some virtual machines configured for when I have to test any software or configuration on another distro, especially when writing a blog post or preparing a talk/workshop.

The virtual machines that are up and running on my laptop includes the following:

  • Arch Linux
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu
  • Fedora
  • CentOS

You can use Vagrant and VirtualBox to have your own virtual dev environments configured on your computer. Through this blog post you will learn how to install and configure both tools.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is one of the most popular virtualization software, developed by Oracle. It supports the following operating systems as host, according to the documentation:

  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, 19.03 and 19.10
  • Debian GNU/Linux 9 ("Stretch") and 10 ("Buster")
  • Oracle Linux 6, 7 and 8
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7 and 8
  • Fedora 30 and 31
  • Gentoo Linux
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise server 12 and 15
  • openSUSE Leap 15.1

As well as any other distro based on Linux kernel 2.6, 3.x, 4.x or 5.x.

Installation

For installing VirtualBox on your Linux distribution, go to the download page and get the right package. There you will find packages for Oracle Linux, RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE y Fedora.

If you want automatic updates, you can configure the package manager of your system with the Oracle repository.

Debian-based

Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

$ echo deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian <mydist> contrib | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list
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Where you must replace <mydist> with 'eoan', 'bionic', 'xenial', 'buster', 'stretch', or 'jessie'.

If you're using Debian 8 ("jessie") / Ubuntu 16.04 ("Xenial") and later, add the Oracle public key running:

$ wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
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For older versions run the following command:

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
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Note: It will probably give you the following error when trying to add the key:

E: gnupg, gnupg2 and gnupg1 do not seem to be installed, but one of them is required for this operation
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If that's the case, install GnuPG:

$ sudo apt install gnupg2
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For installing VirtualBox first update the list of packages in the repositories:

$ sudo apt update
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Then install the latest version of VirtualBox which as of today is 6.1.12:

$ sudo apt install virtualbox-6.1
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RPM-based

On Fedora, add the repository by running the following command:

$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo
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On CentOS:

$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/el/virtualbox.repo
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After running one of the commands above update the list of packages in the repositories:

$ sudo dnf update
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It will ask you if you want to import the Oracle public key, answer y:

Importing GPG key 0x98AB5139:
 Userid     : "Oracle Corporation (VirtualBox archive signing key) <info@virtualbox.org>"
 Fingerprint: 7B0F AB3A 13B9 0743 5925 D9C9 5442 2A4B 98AB 5139
 From       : https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc
Is this ok [y/N]: y
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Before installing VirtualBox make sure the dependencies are installed:

$ sudo dnf install gc make perl elfutils-libelf-devel kernel-devel
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Then install VirtualBox:

$ sudo dnf install VirtualBox-6.1
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Arch-based

On Arch-based distros you can install VirtualBox using pacman as it is available from the official repositories:

$ sudo pacman -S virtualbox
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It will ask you to choose between one of two providers for VIRTUALBOX-HOST-MODULES, for the Linux kernel choose virtualbox-host-modules-arch

:: There are 2 providers available for VIRTUALBOX-HOST-MODULES:
:: Repository community
   1) virtualbox-host-dkms  2) virtualbox-host-modules-arch

Enter a number (default=1): 2
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Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual environments that works on top of VirtualBox, VMware, AWS and other providers. You can install software on the virtual machines using provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet.

Vagrant configures a virtual environment from base images known as "boxes" that you can start using as soon as the virtual machine is up and running.

Some Linux distributions that you can configure using Vagrant are:

You can find more boxes and the instructions for configuring them at:

Installation

For installing Vagrant go to the download page and get the right package for your distribution. You can also install it from the repositories of some Linux distributions.

Debian-based: 

$ sudo apt install vagrant
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Fedora: 

$ sudo dnf install vagrant
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CentOS 

$ sudo dnf install -y https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/2.2.9/vagrant_2.2.9_x86_64.rpm
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Arch Linux: 

$ sudo pacman -S vagrant
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Getting started

First create a directory where you can store the configuration for every virtual environment that you need to configure.

$ mkdir vagrant
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Initial configuration

Once Vagrant is installed run vagrant init for creating a Vagrantfile that contains the initial configuration of the virtual environment.

The Vagrantfile will contain comments with additional information. If you want a file with just the lines needed to create and run your environment, run:

$ vagrant init --minimal
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The Vagrantfile will have the following content and it will be easy to read and modify:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "base"
end
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Here's some vagrant init examples that you could try, don't forget to add the --minimal flag for a shorter Vagrantfile:

$ mkdir debian && cd debian
$ vagrant init debian/buster64
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$ mkdir fedora && cd fedora
$ vagrant init fedora/32-cloud-base
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$ mkdir centos && cd centos
$ vagrant init centos/8
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$ mkdir archlinux && cd archlinux
$ vagrant init archlinux/archlinux
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The commands above will configure Vagrant to download and run official boxes of Debian, Fedora, CentOS or Arch Linux.

Up and running

Once the Vagrantfile is created, run vagrant up for the virtual machine to be started.

Your virtual environment is up and running, now you can access through an SSH connection by running vagrant ssh. After that the prompt will look similar to:

Last login: Sun Aug  9 01:54:17 2020 from 10.0.2.2
[vagrant@localhost ~]$
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Installing software

Once you logged in you can install the tools you need using the package manager or running the instructions needed.

You can also use provisioning tools like shell scripts, Ansible, Chef or Puppet.

Here's an example using a shell script:

If you want to configure a dev environment for Python and manage your project using pyenv and Poetry, create the script install.sh in the folder where the Vagrantfile was created and add the following content:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y make build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev \
libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev \
xz-utils tk-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev python-openssl git

curl https://pyenv.run | bash

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.pyenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc && \
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc && \
echo 'eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python
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Then edit the Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "debian/buster64"
  config.vm.provision :shell, path: "install.sh", privileged: false
end
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After you run vagrant up Vagrant will start configuring your virtual environment and will run the instructions that you specified in the shell script.

Additional commands

To stop a virtual environment run:

$ vagrant halt
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Every time you initialize your virtual environment with vagrant up it will check if there's a new version of the box available. If you update the box you will need to destroy the virtual environment configured with the previous version. Bear in mind that the configuration will not be moved to the new virtual machine.

If you still want to update, run:

$ vagrant box update
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If you don't want Vagrant to check for updates, modify the Vagrantfile adding the following line after config.vm.box:

config.vm.box_check_update = false
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Run the following command if you have to destroy the environment and build it again:

vagrant destroy
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If you want to delete the .box file downloaded the first time you ran vagrant up, run:

vagrant box remove debian/buster64
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Replace debian/buster64 with the name of the box that you're using.

Notes

  • You don't have to open VirtualBox as the virtual machine will be running in the background and will be accessed through an SSH connection.
  • Whenever I try to update the system or install any package on Fedora, the command is stopped by the system. The solution I found was to assign 1 GB of RAM instead of 512 MB (assigned by Vagrant) To change the configuration modify the Vagrantfile as follows: 
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "fedora/32-cloud-base"
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.memory = "1024" 
  end
end
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