Vagrant

Vagrant is an open source tool for managing virtual machines.

Related: Ansible

What is it

Think of Vagrant like a command line interface for VirtualBox.

Vagrant has built-in support for Ansible.

Installing

Start by installing VirtualBox, then install Vagrant from http://www.vagrantup.com/

Starting a Vagrant Machine

Create a directory for your vagrant virtual boxes:

$ mkdir playbooks
$ cd playbooks

From there you can run the vagrant init command to initialize the virtual machine using Vagrant (the first time you run vagrant init it will have to download the virtual machine, which could take a while):

$ vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64
$ vagrant up

Now you can ssh into the new virtual machine using

$ vagrant ssh

To see the SSH details, type:

$ vagrant ssh-config

Host default
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User vagrant
  Port 2222
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile /Users/whoami/dev/ansiblebook/ch01/playbooks/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL

(this should be run from the host machine.)

If multiple virtual machines, each node should have same values except for SSH key.

You can SSH manually using that key:

$ ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222 -i $HOME/dev/ansible/dev/ansiblebook/ch01/playbooks/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key 

This will log you in without prompting for a password.

Note that everything vagrant-related is stored in the .vagrant/ directory.