• Website: http://www.vagrantup.com
• Source: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant
• IRC: #vagrant on Freenode
• Mailing list: Google Groups

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.

Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

First, make sure your development machine has VirtualBox installed. After this, download and install the appropriate Vagrant package for your OS. If you're not on Mac OS X or Windows, you'll need to add /opt/vagrant/bin to your PATH. After this, you're ready to go!

To build your first virtual environment:

vagrant init hashicorp/precise32
vagrant up

Note: The above vagrant up command will also trigger Vagrant to download the precise32 box via the specified URL. Vagrant only does this if it detects that the box doesn't already exist on your system.

To learn how to build a fully functional development environment, follow the getting started guide.

If you want the bleeding edge version of Vagrant, we try to keep master pretty stable and you're welcome to give it a shot. The following is an example showing how to do this:

rake install

Ruby 2.0 is needed.

To hack on vagrant, you'll need bundler which can be installed with a simple gem install bundler. Afterwords, do the following:

bundle install
rake

This will run the unit test suite, which should come back all green! Then you're good to go!

If you want to run Vagrant without having to install the gem, you may use bundle exec, like so:

bundle exec vagrant help

NOTE: By default running Vagrant in via bundle will disable plugins. This is necessary because Vagrant creates its own private Bundler context (it does not respect your Gemfile), because it uses Bundler to manage plugin dependencies.

Vagrant also comes with an acceptance test suite that does black-box tests of various Vagrant components. Note that these tests are extremely slow because actual VMs are spun up and down. The full test suite can take hours. Instead, try to run focused component tests.

To run the acceptance test suite, first copy vagrant-spec.config.example.rb to vagrant-spec.config.rb and modify it to valid values. The places you should fill in are clearly marked.

Next, see the components that can be tested:

$ rake acceptance:components
cli
provider/virtualbox/basic
...

Then, run one of those components:

$ rake acceptance:run COMPONENTS="cli"
...