Linux Administration Cookbook

Using Vagrant to automatically provision VMs

Going through the tedium of installing a new VM every time you want to test something new, or create a sandbox to work in, can get old fast.

Because of this, various administrators and developers have come up with solutions that make provisioning a VM (or several) a breeze.

If we take a moment to think about the advantages of this approach, it's easy to highlight just a few benefits of automated VM provisioning:

• It eliminates the time it takes to manually type answers into a VM window.
• It allows for the automated running of software tests in a development environment.
• It allows for the sharing of text files that act as recipes for how to build a VM, rather than the shifting of large VM images ...