The following tools are required to get started:

You will need to make sure all three of those are installed according to the directions on their respective websites. While this configuration should work on Linux, Mac, and Windows, there have been recent bugs in the Windows 7 version of VirtualBox. Usually, if you stay with the 32-bit version of VirtualBox, things will work fine on Windows as well.

Next you will need to get a copy of the MultiSite Vagrant profile created for this book. The best way to get it is to retrieve it from Drupal.org's Git server (explained here: http://drupal.org/project/1356522/git-instructions). If that doesn't work, you can try to retrieve a Git snapshot and work from there (http://lb.cm/4FJ).

Now you will need to start configuring things. For simplicity's sake, I am assuming that we are working from a UNIX-like shell. Analogous commands are available in Windows, too.

$ cd multisite_vagrant
$ vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
$ vagrant up

The first line in the code puts us in the right directory to begin. Next, we install a basic Ubuntu Linux server profile. This is used for building virtual servers. And thirdly, the vagrant up command tells vagrant to install, boot, and configure our server. It is normal for each of these two Vagrant commands to take a long time.

Once the vagrant up command has finished, your host (local computer) will have a virtual machine running with the following:

Drupal 7, Drush (the Drupal Shell) and a few common modules will also be downloaded, but they are not yet installed. We will talk about these more in the next chapter.

In addition to the basic installation, the MultiSite Vagrant profile also creates three hostname entries and three databases for you.

In the course of this book, we will be creating three independent sites. These sites will be called Books.local, Cooks.local, and Looks.local. Each will have its own database in MySQL too (books_local, cooks_local, and looks_local). The basic host names and databases have already been set up for you. When you ran vagrant up, a script did the necessary configuration in the VM.

But there is still one thing for you to do. You should add the following to your local computer's hosts file (/etc/hosts in UNIX-like operating systems):

33.33.33.10 books.local looks.local cooks.local

This tells your local machine that all of these hostnames can be accessed on your virtual machine.

If you are interested in learning more about the change to the hosts file, it is explained later in the chapter. But as we are focused here on configuring Vagrant we will finish the configuration first.

Now that we have a new virtual machine set up, we can interact with it in several ways.

So immediately you have three ways to connect to your server. You can also connect to other ports on your virtual server (including MySQL's), but the above cover the common cases.

Finally, before we move on, here are a few Vagrant commands you should know:

Vagrant is one option for quickly starting with this book. But since some environments will require manual customization, in the next few sections I will walk through a manual process of configuring hostnames, Apache and MySQL.

If you are running Vagrant you don't need to do these parts. You can skip ahead to the Summary section.