Vagrant Templates

The point of this repository is to hold Vagrantfile templates that I personally use as starting points for self-contained development/testing environments.

These are not minimal templates. They include configuration tweaks, workarounds for common issues that I bumped into, and provisioning scripts that install a few extra packages and customize the shell environment a bit. Check the appropriate Vagrantfile and the vagrant/provision.sh script, they should be fairly easy to modify. Some usage examples:

• Use them as is to spin up readily usable VMs where you can log into and test random stuff.
• Add the necessary steps to provision your application inside the VM, maybe removing some redundant things.
• Just use them as a reference to write your own minimal environments with tweaked settings.

Most of these templates default to bento-based boxes for convenience (i.e. pre-installed guest additions).

Dependencies

You'll need VirtualBox and Vagrant. Some templates may ask to install the vagrant-vbguest plugin (to share folders with the host) on vagrant up if they need it.

Host-Only Networking

Starting with version 6.1.28, VirtualBox restricts the address ranges usable in host-only networks which causes vagrant up to fail as it tries to create an host-only network using a disallowed address range. This requires manual intervention in VirtualBox before the first ever vagrant up on the host:

On unix-like hosts, go to File -> Host Network Manager and create the vboxnet0 network if it doesn't already exist, also making sure it has the DHCP server enabled (default).

On Windows hosts go to File -> Tools -> Network Manager, select the Host-only Networks tab and remove the existing "VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter" entry. It will be automatically recreated with the necessary settings on vagrant up.

Local Customization

The default VM size is defined in the Vagrantfile but, sometimes, it's useful to locally override these settings without affecting other users of the same repo. Do this by creating a .vagrant_size.json next to the Vagrantfile with the following (example) contents:

{
    "cpus": 2,
    "memory": 4096
}

Guest Additions

By default, the vagrant-vbguest plugin tries to install/update the VirtualBox Guest Additions on every vagrant up. I find this annoying and recommend you to disable this behavior by adding something like the following to your ~/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
    ...

    if Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-vbguest")
        config.vbguest.auto_update = false
        config.vbguest.allow_downgrade = false
    end

    ...
end

The templates that need to install/update the VirtualBox Guest Additions already (re)enable auto_update explicitly.

Clock Drift

On older machines, the (VM) clocks may drift quite significantly with paravirtualization enabled. This is unlikely to happen nowadays but, if it does, add the following to your ~/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
    ...

    config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v, override|
        v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--paravirtprovider", "legacy"]
    end

    ...
end