Vagrantfiles

A Vagrantfile contains the box and provision configuration settings for your VM. The syntax of Vagrantfiles is Ruby (Ruby experience is not necessary).

The command vagrant up creates a Vagrant Box based on your Vagrantfile. A Vagrant box is one of the motivations for using Vagrant - its a “development-ready box” that can be copied to other machines to recreate the same environment.

It’s common for people to think that a Vagrant box is the VM. But rather, the VM is inside a Vagrant box, with the box containing additional configuration options you can set, such as VM options, scripts to run on boot, etc.

This Vagrant website for boxes shows you how to configure a basic Vagrantfile for your specific OS and VM software.

Box configuration

Looking at the Vagrant File, we can see that the default OS is Ubuntu 16.04 (since the variable distro equals ubuntu1604 if there is no VPP_VAGRANT_DISTRO variable set - thus the else case is executed.)

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

  # Pick the right distro and bootstrap, default is ubuntu1604
  distro = ( ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_DISTRO'] || "ubuntu1604")
  if distro == 'centos7'
    config.vm.box = "centos/7"
    config.vm.box_version = "1708.01"
    config.ssh.insert_key = false
  else
    config.vm.box = "puppetlabs/ubuntu-16.04-64-nocm"

As mentioned in the previous page, you can specify which OS and VM provider you want for your Vagrant box from the Vagrant boxes page, and setting your ENV variable appropriately in env.sh.

Next in the Vagrantfile, you see some config.vm.provision commands. As paraphrased from Basic usage of Provisioners, by default these are only run once - during the first boot of the box.

config.vm.provision :shell, :path => File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),"update.sh")
config.vm.provision :shell, :path => File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),"build.sh"), :args => "/vpp vagrant"

The two lines above set the VM to run two scripts during its first bootup: an update script update.sh that does basic updating and installation of some useful tools, as well as build.sh that builds (but does not install) VPP in the VM. You can view these scripts on your own for more detail on the commands used.

Looking further in the Vagrant File, you can see more Ruby variables being set to ENV’s or to a default value:

# Define some physical ports for your VMs to be used by DPDK
nics = (ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_NICS'] || "2").to_i(10)
for i in 1..nics
  config.vm.network "private_network", type: "dhcp"
end

# use http proxy if available
if ENV['http_proxy'] && Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-proxyconf")
 config.proxy.http     = ENV['http_proxy']
 config.proxy.https    = ENV['https_proxy']
 config.proxy.no_proxy = "localhost,127.0.0.1"
end

vmcpu=(ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_VMCPU'] || 2)
vmram=(ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_VMRAM'] || 4096)

You can see how the box or VM is configured, such as the amount of NICs (defaults to 3 NICs: 1 x NAT - host access and 2 x VPP DPDK enabled), CPUs (defaults to 2), and RAM (defaults to 4096 MB).

Box bootup

Once you’re satisfied with your Vagrantfile, boot the box with:

$ vagrant up

Doing this above command will take quite some time, since you are installing a VM and building VPP. Take a break and get some scooby snacks while you wait.

To confirm it is up, show the status and information of Vagrant boxes with:

$ vagrant global-status
id       name    provider   state    directory
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
d90a17b  default virtualbox poweroff /home/centos/andrew-vpp/vppsb/vpp-userdemo
77b085e  default virtualbox poweroff /home/centos/andrew-vpp/vppsb2/vpp-userdemo
c1c8952  default virtualbox poweroff /home/centos/andrew-vpp/testingVPPSB/extras/vagrant
c199140  default virtualbox running  /home/centos/andrew-vpp/vppsb3/vpp-userdemo

You will have only one machine running, but I have multiple as shown above.

Note

To poweroff your VM, type:

$ vagrant halt <id>

To resume your VM, type:

$ vagrant resume <id>

To destroy your VM, type:

$ vagrant destroy <id>

Note that “destroying” a VM does not erase the box, but rather destroys all resources allocated for that VM. For other Vagrant commands, such as destroying a box, refer to the Vagrant CLI Page.