What is Vagrant? From the Vagrant website:

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

Why would a sysadmin care about building a development environment? Vagrant is a good way to get started with Puppet/Chef without a ton of overhead in setting up a server.

How does using Vagrant mean I can do more with less?

Imagine being able to provide developers with a virtual environment to do testing on their first day.  Changes could be deployed to the virtual environment via source code pulls. Large open source organizations like Mozilla are already doing this.

Your Workstation

You can do most of this work with Windows but most of the literature available on references work that was done on a Linux-based kernel. Since we are diving into Vagrant, which leverages virtualization, this must be your native environment.

  • Mac OS X
  • Ubuntu 10.04 or later

Often times workstation setup is what turns admins away from use of a lot of these new tools. Be patient, ask questions, and be patient. =)

  • Install RVM - not a requirement for RVM, but it will make your life easier in the long run.

  • After RVM is set up:

    rvm install 1.9.2

  • Download and Install VirtualBox.

  • Now install Vagrant:

    gem install vagrant

Here are a couple of cool projects you can get going with now that you’re setup with Vagrant: