We can do this every time by hand, but it would be time-consuming and error-prone. We need to install and configure the necessary components to have a useful development environment.

Usually, simple boxes aren't enough for our use cases. We can manage boxes directly with the vagrant box command. Boxes can have an optional metadata file that contains information about versioning, providers, or simply the name and description of the box. To do this, it had to look into the metadata of the box. => default: Successfully added box 'hashicorp/bionic64' (v1.0.282) for 'virtualbox'!Īs we can see, Vagrant didn’t find the box on our machine, so it downloaded it from Vagrant Cloud. => default: Adding box 'hashicorp/bionic64' (v1.0.282) for provider: virtualbox => default: Loading metadata for box 'hashicorp/bionic64' => default: Box 'hashicorp/bionic64' could not be found. This command downloads the specified box and starts the virtual machine: Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider. The up command in Vagrant creates and configures our environment: $ vagrant up Let’s start a virtual machine using the previously defined Vagrantfile. We've removed some comments from the file for clarity: Let’s take a look at the generated file and understand what each section does. You are now ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on `` for more information on using Vagrant. It produces the following output, and we can find the generated Vagrantfile in the directory: A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. We can create an initial Vagrantfile in this directory using the init command: $ vagrant init hashicorp/bionic64 Let’s create our Vagrant project in a directory called vagrant-start. On the other hand, if we know Ruby well, we can make use of it and create more complex Vagrantfiles easily. Most of the time, we use simple operations, for example, variable assignment. Vagrantfiles use the Ruby programming language, but we don’t necessarily need to know Ruby to create, understand or modify these files. For example, we can have a Vagrantfile in our Vagrant home directory with some default configuration and override the project-specific values in the project directory.

However, when we run Vagrant commands, it looks for other Vagrantfiles on our filesystem and merges the relevant ones to build the final configuration.

Vagrant list boxes