Basic usage.

This will init a basic Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (64-bit) setup:

vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64

The response to this command will be:

A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read
the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on
`vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.

A full list of available boxes can be found here:

https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search

Once that Vagrant box has been downloaded, run this command to start the instance:

vagrant up

This variant of the command will give you debugging info:

vagrant up --debug

And this variant of the command will rerun the provisioning scripts on an already established Vagrant box:

vagrant up --provision

SSH into the Vagrant box with this command:

vagrant ssh

Stop the Vagrant box like this:

vagrant halt

If you want to stop the Vagrant box and get rid of the installed disk/config from VirtualBox, run this command:

vagrant destroy

You can change the default path that Vagrant uses to save remove boxes by entering this in the Terminal or adding it to your .bash_profile:

export VAGRANT_HOME="/path/to/save/VagrantBoxes"

And the default SSH password for the user vagrant is vagrant.

Get the status of all Vagrant instances connected to your logged in user running this command:

vagrant global-status

The output should be something like this:

id       name                provider   state    directory
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0b55b6e  default             virtualbox poweroff /Users/jack/Vagrant-Scripts/Ubuntu1404
689d9e7  vagrant             virtualbox running  /Users/jack/Vagrant-Scripts
28ee4e8  sandbox             virtualbox poweroff /Users/jack/Vagrant-Scripts
b467de6  Sandbox_UBUNTU_1404 virtualbox poweroff /Users/jack/Vagrant-Scripts

The above shows information about all known Vagrant environments
on this machine. This data is cached and may not be completely
up-to-date. To interact with any of the machines, you can go to
that directory and run Vagrant, or you can use the ID directly
with Vagrant commands from any directory. For example:
"vagrant destroy 1a2b3c4d"

Note that list is a mess since a lot of the the machines listed don’t exist anymore for various reasons. So to clean up the list, run this command to prune the list:

vagrant global-status --prune

And the list should be trimmed down as follows:

id       name                provider   state    directory
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
b467de6  Sandbox_UBUNTU_1404 virtualbox poweroff /Users/jack/Vagrant-Scripts

The above shows information about all known Vagrant environments
on this machine. This data is cached and may not be completely
up-to-date. To interact with any of the machines, you can go to
that directory and run Vagrant, or you can use the ID directly
with Vagrant commands from any directory. For example:
"vagrant destroy 1a2b3c4d"

To upgrade the already downloaded Vagrant boxes—so you don’t have to upgrade each boxes OS individually—just run this command:

vagrant box --force update

And for some reason in macOS, that command will choke in El Capitan (10.11) and Sierra (10.12) when running Vagrant 1.8.7. And the solution is to ditch the Vagrant specific version of Curl like this:

sudo rm /opt/vagrant/embedded/bin/curl

As of Vagrant version 1.9 and above, to clear out old and outdated versions of Vagrant boxes—which are often not needed and take up space—just run this command:

vagrant box prune

---

Debugging Vagrant.

Check the SSH options for the Vagrant box:

vagrant ssh-config

Output should be something like this:

Host default
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User vagrant
  Port 2222
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile "/Users/jack/Vagrant_Ubuntu_1404/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key"
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL

---

Configuring Vagrant.

Okay, so with the basics done, you can edit the Vagrant config file (aka: Vagrantfile) to have a config like this:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.box_check_update = false
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.56.20"
  config.vm.hostname = "vagrant"
end

I removed all of the comments and just have a few of the core config options such as disabling the update checking and setting a private “host only” network to 192.168.56.20.

---

Upgrading Vagrant.

If you download Vagrant and it seemingly hangs forever on “Verifying Vagrant.pkg” window that is becuase of System Integrity Protection (SIP). To get around this, install—or upgrade Vagrant—from the command line like this:

sudo installer -package /Volumes/Vagrant/Vagrant.pkg -target /

---

Creating your own Vagrant box.

Building a Vagrant box:

Build a basic OS box.

Set it up like any VirtualBox setup with the default user set as sysop. Just make sure the second Ethernet adapter is a “Host Only” adapter and gets the IP address of 192.168.56.20. Temporarily bring up the interface like this:

sudo ifconfig eth1 192.168.56.20 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Open up the /etc/network/interfaces file:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

And add—or adjust—the interface details like this:

# The local hostmachine access interface.
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.56.20
netmask 255.255.255.0

Start the VirtualBox virtual machine as a headless machine.

nohup VBoxHeadless --startvm "Ubuntu 14.04" &

Slight variant of the command without a nohup.out file being created:

nohup VBoxHeadless --startvm "Ubuntu 14.04" >/dev/null 2>&1 &

Setup a user named vagrant.

Use the password vagrant:

sudo adduser vagrant

Add the vagrant user to the sudo group:

sudo adduser vagrant sudo

Enable sudo without a password for the vagrant user.

sudo mkdir -p /home/vagrant/.ssh/

Now create a authorized_keys file:

sudo nano /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys

And add this Vagrant insecure public key to the authorized keys:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA6NF8iallvQVp22WDkTkyrtvp9eWW6A8YVr+kz4TjGYe7gHzIw+niNltGEFHzD8+v1I2YJ6oXevct1YeS0o9HZyN1Q9qgCgzUFtdOKLv6IedplqoPkcmF0aYet2PkEDo3MlTBckFXPITAMzF8dJSIFo9D8HfdOV0IAdx4O7PtixWKn5y2hMNG0zQPyUecp4pzC6kivAIhyfHilFR61RGL+GPXQ2MWZWFYbAGjyiYJnAmCP3NOTd0jMZEnDkbUvxhMmBYSdETk1rRgm+R4LOzFUGaHqHDLKLX+FIPKcF96hrucXzcWyLbIbEgE98OHlnVYCzRdK8jlqm8tehUc9c9WhQ== vagrant insecure public key

And now set the proper permissions for the .ssh/directory and the authorized_keys file:

sudo chmod 700 /home/vagrant/.ssh
sudo chmod 600 /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys

Creating the actual Vagrant box.

With that done, let’s create a Vagrant package. Check your existing boxes like this:

vagrant box list

Output should be something like this:

There are no installed boxes! Use `vagrant box add` to add some.

So to do that, let’s export the Ubuntu 14.04 template we just setup like this:

vagrant package --base 'Ubuntu 14.04' --output Ubuntu_14.04_template

The output should be something like this:

==> Ubuntu 14.04: Exporting VM...
==> Ubuntu 14.04: Compressing package to: /Users/jack/Ubuntu_14.04_template

Once that’s done, let’s add the exported template to the list of available Vagrant packages like this:

vagrant box add Ubuntu_14.04_template --name 'Ubuntu 14.04'

The output should be something like this:

==> box: Box file was not detected as metadata. Adding it directly...
==> box: Adding box 'Ubuntu 14.04' (v0) for provider:
    box: Unpacking necessary files from: file:///Users/jack/Ubuntu_14.04_template
==> box: Successfully added box 'Ubuntu 14.04' (v0) for 'virtualbox'!

With that done, run the Vagrant box list command again like this:

vagrant box list

And the output should be something like this:

Ubuntu 14.04 (virtualbox, 0)