Overview As part of my demo during my Vagrant talk, I use the opentable/win-8.1-enterprise-amd64-nocm vagrant base box with the virtualbox provider. This vagrant base box unfortunately has an issue with the vagrantfile that is included with it looking for the old/unneeded vagrant windows plugin to be installed and trying to port forward the WinRM and RDP ports without detecting if the port is already in use. Luckily, it is really easy to fix the included vagrantfile so that you can create vagrant machines but you have to do some prework before running a vagrant up using this base box.
Overview If you are working behind a proxy server you will need to configure both the host computer and the Vagrant virtual machines to communicate through the proxy server. It is easy to configure the proxy settings but finding the documentation is a different story. Below we will go through how to configure the proxy for the vagrant commands (up, status, box add, etc) and then how to configure the virtual machine proxy settings.
Welcome to the Vagrant lesson on how to use Boxstarter to configure Windows and install software as part of the Vagrant provisioning process. Overview We have all of the needed software in place to start configuring and installing software onto our virtual machine. In this lesson, we will create an file with all of the install and configuration commands that will be executed with Boxstarter. Can I only install Chocolatey Packages?
Welcome to the Vagrant lesson on installing Boxstarter as part of the Vagrant provisioning process. What does Boxstarter give you? Boxstarter gives you the ability to bulk install Chocolatey packages plus several helper functions for Windows configuration options. When you bulk install using Boxstarter, it will detect any reboots that are triggered by MSI installers, reboot the machine and then run the Boxstarter script again. The Windows configuration helper functions that Boxstarter provides to enable or disable Windows features include items such as:
Welcome to the Vagrant lesson on installing Chocolatey as part of the Vagrant provisioning process. Overview The first thing we are going to do as part our provisioning is to install Chocolatey onto the virtual machine. As we saw in the [Easy Virtual Machine Management]({{"/vagrant-overview" | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}) post, having Chocolatey on a machine allows you to easily install all of our software in an automated and repeatable fashion.
Welcome to the Vagrant lesson on what Vagrant provisioning is. What is Vagrant Provisioning? Provisioners allow you to automatically install software and alter configurations during the Vagrant up process. This is useful since boxes typically aren’t built perfectly for your use case. Granted you could just login to the box and install all of the software by hand. However, by using the provisioning it automates the process, make it repeatable, and requires no human interaction.
Welcome to an overview of Vagrant and creating of your first Vagrant machine. What is Vagrant? Vagrant allows you to create and manage lightweight reproducible virtual machines. Essentially, all of the configurations to create and configure a virtual machine are kept separate from the virtual machine. This allows you to delete the virtual machine and then re-create it with all of the same configurations at any point. No longer do you have to be afraid to delete a virtual machine for a project that isn’t active.
When I am provisioning a new development virtual machine with vagrant, I do not need all of the Windows 8 modern applications such as bing maps, finance, skype, etc to be installed onto the virtual machine. These applications are nice on a non-virtualized machine but on a virtual machine it just uses extra resources that aren’t needed. The base install of Windows has all of these programs installed with live tiles turned on that I don’t need.
If you have looked at setting up the Ionic Framework or have it done it before, you know on much of a pain it can be, especially when something doesn’t work. Luckily, Ionic offers a free virtual machine called Ionicbox that is already configured with all of the software that you need. Prerequisites: Before you can use Ionicbox you need to install VirtualBox and Vagrant. If you are on Windows and using Chocolatey, you can install both using cinst virtualbox and cinst vagrant.