Installing Vagrant on Manjaro i3

Vagrant a high-level open-source tool for building and maintaining virtual environments. With the use of plugins, Vagrant can manage many underlying VM technology, like VirtualBox, KVM, etc. In this article we will configure Vagrant with KVM/QEMU.

Install

vagrant using either pamac…

$ pamac install vagrant

…or

pacman:

$ sudo pacman -Sy vagrant

You can verify vagrant is installed by checking the version number.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ vagrant version
Installed Version: 2.2.19
Latest Version: 2.2.19
 
You're running an up-to-date version of Vagrant!

You can also take a look at the help page using the -h or –help options for an idea of how to use this command.

$ vagrant -h

You can also use the help option on sub commands, like plugin for example.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ vagrant plugin -h
Usage: vagrant plugin <command> [<args>]

Available subcommands:
     expunge
     install
     license
     list
     repair
     uninstall
     update

Above we can see that we can list what plugins are installed. On my system, we can see that I currently have no plugins installed.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ vagrant plugin list
No plugins installed.

Install the vagrant-libvirt plugin.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt

Create a directory in your home where you will keep your vagrant files.

[andy@home-pc ~]$ mkdir -v ~/Vagrant
mkdir: created directory '/home/andy/Vagrant'
[andy@home-pc ~]$ cd ~/Vagrant
[andy@home-pc Vagrant]$ 

Here I’m looking to install Alma Linux 8. Navigate to the below URL and search for your preferred distro.

https://app.vagrantup.com/almalinux/boxes/8

Use the vagrant init command to generate the Vagrant file.

[andy@home-pc Vagrant]$ vagrant init almalinux/8
A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read
the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on
`vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.

Here we can see its generated the Vagrantfile.

[andy@home-pc Vagrant]$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 andy andy 3017 Jul 12 00:09 Vagrantfile

This file contains a lot of useful information that you can read using less.

[andy@home-pc Vagrant]$ less Vagrantfile

Ultimately though, it creates file containing the following. Note – the below command uses

egrep -v to strip out the comment:

$ egrep -v "^[[:space:]]*$|#" Vagrantfile 
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "almalinux/8"
end

With that file now in place, you should be able to create and start the VM using vagrant up.

[andy@home-pc Vagrant]$ vagrant up

This should start up the machine and provide output in relation to what its doing:

You can check the ssh configuration with the following:

Which means you can login with:

…or simply with:

$ vagrant ssh
[vagrant@localhost ~]$

You can check the status using vagrant from within the

~/Vagrant directory we created earlier like so.

From any directory – you can check the status with the

global-status option.

You can also globally (from any directory) control your VM with vagrant – like shut it down using the

halt command. However, here we do have to provide the ID.

To completely delete a VM – you can use the destroy option. Again, this can be done globally using the ID as above, or from within the directory we created earlier.