Chapter 3. Vagrant Projects

A vagrant box is not the same as a vagrant project. Remember that a box is just an image of the operating system. You can create many projects using the same image. But we will need a box before we can create project.

You can use the precise32 box we downloaded earlier for multiple projects. This is actually one of the main use cases for vagrant. You can isolate the libraries and configurations of your projects. That way, you always have a clean baseline box.

To create our first project, we need to do (a) create a folder for our project (b) run vagrant init inside the project folder and (c) edit the vagrant file if we want to alter some of the default settings of vagrant

Creating a project. 

mkdir ~/vms/myproject && cd ~/vms/myproject
vagrant init precise32 

3.1. Start, Suspend, Resume, Stop and Destroy

Start the vagrant project, we need to (a) switch to the vagrant project folder and (b) start the VM with the vagrant up command

Starting a vagrant project. 

cd ~/vms/myproject && vagrant up

	Tip
	If you are used to working with virtualbox and any other hypervisor, you might be wondering why we don’t see the usual window of virtualbox. Vagrant, by default runs in headless mode that is why we don’t see any GUI interfaces to it. You can work with the virtualbox GUI if you really want (need) to, but working on the CLI is the idiomatic way of working with vagrant.

Managing vagrant boxes. 

vagrant suspend  
vagrant resume 
vagrant halt 
vagrant destroy 

	Puts the machine to sleep mode
	Wake up from suspend
	Graceful shutdown
	This is like halt, but it also destroys the VM itself

	Turning the GUI on
	If you still want to see the GUI of the virtualbox session, you can do the following Exit the existing virtual machine session, if you are in one Edit the Vagrantfile configuration Look for the config.vm.provider entry and uncomment that section Reload the virtual machine using the command vagrant reload