Ansible: Up and Running

Chapter 11. Vagrant

Vagrant is a great environment for testing Ansible playbooks, which is why I’ve been using it all along in this book, and why I often use Vagrant for testing my own Ansible playbooks.

Vagrant isn’t just for testing configuration management scripts; it was originally designed to create repeatable development environments. If you’ve ever joined a new software team and spent a couple of days discovering what software you had to install on your laptop so you could run a development version of an internal product, you’ve felt the pain that Vagrant was built to alleviate. Ansible playbooks are a great way to specify how to configure a Vagrant machine so newcomers on your team can get up and running on day one.

Vagrant has some built-in support for Ansible that we haven’t been taking advantage of. In this chapter, we’ll cover Vagrant’s support for using Ansible to configure Vagrant machines.

Tip

A full treatment of Vagrant is out of scope of this book. For more information, check out Vagrant: Up and Running, authored by Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Vagrant.

Convenient Vagrant Configuration Options

Vagrant exposes many configuration options for virtual machines, but there are two that I find particularly useful when using Vagrant for testing: setting a specific IP address and enabling agent forwarding.

Port Forwarding and Private IP Addresses

When you create a new Vagrantfile using the vagrant init command, the default networking configuration allows you to ...