Chapter 1, Getting Started with Vagrant, introduces the concept of virtualization, its importance in the role of the development environment, and walks you through the Vagrant installation process.

Chapter 2, Managing Vagrant Boxes and Projects, walks you through creating Vagrant projects, exploring and configuring the Vagrantfile, and working with base boxes.

Chapter 3, Provisioning with Puppet, explores Puppet, the provisioning tool, and how to create Puppet manifests to provision a server.

Chapter 4, Using Ansible, explores Ansible, the provisioning tool, and how to create Ansible playbooks to provision a server.

Chapter 5, Using Chef, explores Chef, the provisioning tool, and how to create Chef recipes to provision a server.

Chapter 6, Provisioning Vagrant Machines with Puppet, Ansible, and Chef, discusses how to use Puppet, Ansible, and Chef within the context of Vagrant to provision development environments.

Chapter 7, Working with Multiple Machines, explores using Vagrant to create and manage projects that use multiple virtual machines, which communicate with each other.

Chapter 8, Creating Your Own Box, discusses the process of creating your own base box for use within a Vagrant project.

Chapter 9, HashiCorp Atlas, walks you through using Vagrant Share to share SSH and HTTP(S) access to a Vagrant-managed machine, and how to use the services provided through the Vagrant Cloud.

Appendix, A Sample LEMP Stack, walks you through the process of creating a LEMP server within a new Vagrant project.

You will need a Windows, OS X, or Linux computer with Vagrant and Oracle VirtualBox installed, although the installation process for these will be discussed in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Vagrant.

This book is for software developers, development managers, and technical team leaders who want to have a more efficient, robust, and flexible development environment for their projects and for their team.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "After installing Vagrant, we ran the vagrant command to check whether it was installed correctly."

A block of code is set as follows:

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "base"
end

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

---
- hosts: default
  tasks:
  - name: update apt cache
    apt: update_cache=yes
  - name: ensure nginx is installed
    apt: pkg=nginx state=present
  - name: write the nginx config file
    template: src=nginx-default-site.conf dest=/etc/nginx/sites-available/default.conf
    notify:
    - restart nginx
  - name: ensure nginx is running
    service: name=nginx state=started
  handlers:
    - name: restart nginx
      service: name=nginx state=restarted

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

ansible-playbook our-playbook.yml -i our-inventory-file

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Again, on OS X, the first step is to double-click on the Vagrant.pkg icon."

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