Vagrant with KVM for development

Vagrant allows for quick deployment of virtual machines for development use. It allows you to provision software, forward ports, and share development environments between people are computers.

First install vagrant and the KVM (libvirtd) provider.

sudo apt-get install vagrant
sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev libvirt-dev zlib1g-dev
vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt

Then create a vagrant configuration file (Vagrantfile), which specifies the image to use. Vagrant calls images Boxes, and they are found over at hashicorp. Make sure that you choose a libvirt image, and not the default VMware.

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "naelyn/ubuntu-trusty64-libvirt"

  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 8001, host: 8001
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 8000, host: 8000

  config.vm.provision "shell", path: "install.sh"
end

This config will spin up a Ubuntu based image with two ports forwarded and execute the install script when it is first created. To re-run the provisioning script (install.sh) simply call vagrant provision.

The install file is project specific, and in this case it updates the package manager and installs node and PostgreSQL. It then changes to the shared folder and installs all the dependencies for the node project. Contents of install.sh:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs npm postgresql
sudo ln -s $(which nodejs) /usr/bin/node 
cd /vagrant 
npm install 

/vagrant is mapped to the relative path of where the Vagrantfile is stored. This is normally stored in the git repository for the project. You will need to run vagrant rsync-auto to sync the changes between the VM and the host.

And that’s it Vagrant in a nutshell. All that’s left to do is start the VM:

vagrant up

It will update and install the software as specified in the install script.

vagrant ssh

PS. If you have not got KVM working…

apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin bridge-utils # Install KVM stuff
usermod -a -G libvirtd <user> # Add existing user to libvirtd group

7 Jan 2016