Download and install VirtualBox at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.

Download and install Vagrant at https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html.

Install the Omnibus Vagrant plugin to enable Vagrant to install the Chef client on your VM by running the following command:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus
Installing the 'vagrant-omnibus' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-omnibus (1.4.1)'!

Let's create and boot a virtual node by using Vagrant:

The Vagrantfile is written in a Ruby Domain Specific Language (DSL) to configure the Vagrant virtual machines. We want to boot a simple Ubuntu VM. Let's go through the Vagrantfile step by step.

First, we create a config object. Vagrant will use this config object to configure the VM:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
end

Inside the config block, we tell Vagrant which VM image to use, in order to boot the node:

config.vm.box = "opscode-ubuntu-14.10"
config.vm.box_url = "https://opscode-vm-bento.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/virtualbox/opscode_ubuntu-14.10_chef-provisionerless.box"

We want to boot our VM using a so-called Bento Box, provided by Chef. We use Ubuntu Version 14.10 here.

As we want our VM to have the Chef client installed, we tell the omnibus vagrant plugin to use the latest version of Chef client:

  config.omnibus.chef_version = :latest

After selecting the VM image to boot, we configure how to provision the box by using Chef. The Chef configuration happens in a nested Ruby block:

  config.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
  ...
  end

Inside this Chef block, we need to instruct Vagrant on how to hook up our virtual node to the Chef server. First, we need to tell Vagrant where to store all the Chef stuff on your node:

    chef.provisioning_path = "/etc/chef"

Vagrant needs to know the API endpoint of your Chef server. If you use hosted Chef, it is https://api.chef.io/organizations/<YOUR_ORG>. You need to replace <YOUR_ORG> with the name of the organization that you created in your account on hosted Chef. If you are using your own Chef server, change the URL accordingly:

    chef.chef_server_url = "https://api.chef.io/organizations/<YOUR_ORG>"

While creating your organization on hosted Chef, you must download your private key. Tell Vagrant where to find this file:

    chef.validation_key_path = ".chef/<YOUR_ORG>—validator.pem"

Also, you need to tell Vagrant as to which client it should validate itself against the Chef server:

    chef.validation_client_name = "<YOUR_ORG>-validator"

Finally, you should tell Vagrant how to name your node:

    chef.node_name = "server"

After configuring your Vagrantfile, all you need to do is run the basic Vagrant commands such as vagrant up, vagrant provision, and vagrant ssh. To stop your VM, just run the vagrant halt command.

If you want to start from scratch again, you will have to destroy your VM and delete both the client and the node from your Chef server by running the following command:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ vagrant destroy
mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife node delete server -y && knife client delete server -y

Alternatively, you may use the Vagrant Butcher plugin found at https://github.com/cassianoleal/vagrant-butcher.