How To Setup Vagrant and Virtual Box for Ubuntu 20.04!!

A quick and easy guide to setting up a production environment on your local machine.

Akash Rajvanshi

Published in

DevOps Dudes

5 min readSep 22, 2020

Overview

What is Vagrant??

Vagrant is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments, e.g., for Virtual Box, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, and AWS.

What is Virtual Box??

Oracle VM Virtual Box is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization, developed by Oracle Corporation. Created by Innotek, it was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, which was, in turn, acquired by Oracle in 2010. Virtual Box can be installed on Windows, Mac-OS, Linux, Solaris, and Open Solaris.

Virtual Box + Vagrant = 🔥

Vagrant and Virtual Box can stimulate the production environment of your app or website. For example, suppose you’re using Digital Ocean or AWS to run a Virtual Private Server (VPS) in the cloud running Ubuntu, PHP, and MySQL. In that case, you can install your local version to have all the same versions of that software while keeping your own computer’s software untouched. These both can reduce and eliminate bugs and errors that result from trying to develop code for a production server on an environment that does not match. So with these, you can create VMs in a virtual box in just one command with so much customization.

Install Virtual Box

Download Virtual Box 5.2.x ( Latest ) and its Extension Pack from Virtual Box 5.2.x Builds. I am using virtual box 5.2.x because the vagrant gives a problem with 6.x sometimes. That’s why I m using 5.2.x (It’s working like a charm ).

Virtual Box Installation for Ubuntu

Install Vagrant

Vagrant Installation for Ubuntu

Let’s Deploy Some Fun 🔥

Here, we start 2 Ubuntu 18.04 VM’s with vagrant, and we set up the Kubernetes cluster on nodes ( 1 work as master node & other work as worker node ) in just less than a minute. So, let’s start the journey 🎇:

Directory Structure

├── files
│   └── daemon.json
├── vars
│   └── default.yml
├── ansible.cfg
├── hosts
├── docker.yml
├── kubernetes.yml
├── portainer.yml
└── Vagrantfile

First of all, you need to create VM’s with vagrant. To create VM’s with vagrant, you need to create a file name Vagrantfile. This given Vagrantfile will set up two Ubuntu 18.04 VM’s in VirtualBox.

Deploy the VM’s

$ vagrant up$ vagrant status
Current machine states:master                    running (virtualbox)
worker                    running (virtualbox)

We set up the Kubernetes cluster on both nodes ( 1 Master, 1 Worker Node). To do this whole process, we are using ansible.

To setup ansible ( You need to install ansible on your working machine )
Now, you need to create some ansible config files so that Ansible can connect to the nodes.

hosts

hosts

ansible.cfg

ansible.cfg

To check connection to the nodes with ansible:

$ ansible cluster -i hosts -m ping   
worker | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}
master | SUCCESS => {
    "ansible_facts": {
        "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
    },
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

To Install Docker

You can install docker on both the nodes in just a 20s.

docker.yaml

files/daemon.json

# Run ansible playbook
$ time ansible-playbook -i hosts docker.ymlPLAY [Install Docker with Ansible] *******************************************************************TASK [Gathering Facts] *******************************************************************************
ok: [worker]
ok: [master]TASK [Updating the system] ***************************************************************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]TASK [Upgrading the system] **************************************************************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]TASK [Installing aptitude using apt] *****************************************************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]TASK [Installing required system packages] ***********************************************************
changed: [master] => (item=apt-transport-https)
changed: [worker] => (item=apt-transport-https)
ok: [master] => (item=ca-certificates)
ok: [worker] => (item=ca-certificates)
ok: [master] => (item=curl)
ok: [worker] => (item=curl)
ok: [master] => (item=software-properties-common)
ok: [worker] => (item=software-properties-common)
changed: [worker] => (item=python3-pip)
changed: [master] => (item=python3-pip)
changed: [worker] => (item=virtualenv)
changed: [master] => (item=virtualenv)
ok: [worker] => (item=python3-setuptools)
ok: [master] => (item=python3-setuptools)
ok: [worker] => (item=python3-apt)
ok: [master] => (item=python3-apt)TASK [Adding Docker GPG apt Key] *********************************************************************
changed: [worker]
changed: [master]TASK [Adding Docker Repository] **********************************************************************
changed: [worker]
changed: [master]TASK [Updating apt and installing docker-ce] *********************************************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]TASK [Copying Daemon File] ***************************************************************************
changed: [worker]
changed: [master]TASK [Restarting Docker Service] *********************************************************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]TASK [Adding vagrant user to docker] *****************************************************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]PLAY RECAP *******************************************************************************************
master                     : ok=11   changed=10   unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0   
worker                     : ok=11   changed=10   unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0ansible-playbook -i hosts docker.yml  20.73s user 2.53s system 11% cpu 3:18.11 total

To Install Portainer

You can install portainer on both the nodes in just 6s. ( To access the portainer http://NodeIP:9000 )

portainer.yaml

vars/default.yml

# Run playbook
$ time ansible-playbook -i hosts portainer.ymlPLAY [Installing Portainer With Ansible] *************************************************************TASK [Gathering Facts] *******************************************************************************
ok: [master]
ok: [worker]TASK [Installing Docker Module for Python] ***********************************************************
changed: [worker]
changed: [master]TASK [Pulling portainer docker image] ****************************************************************
changed: [worker]
changed: [master]TASK [Creating Portainer Container] ******************************************************************
changed: [worker]
changed: [master]PLAY RECAP *******************************************************************************************
master                     : ok=4    changed=3    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0   
worker                     : ok=4    changed=3    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0ansible-playbook -i hosts portainer.yml  6.10s user 0.81s system 16% cpu 42.014 total

To Install Kubernetes

You can setup Kubernetes using microk8s in just 11s.

# Run playbook
$ time ansible-playbook -i hosts kubernetes.ymlPLAY [Setup Kubernetes with Ansible] *****************************************************************TASK [Gathering Facts] *******************************************************************************
ok: [worker]
ok: [master]TASK [Updating the system] ***************************************************************************
ok: [master]
ok: [worker]TASK [Installing Snap] *******************************************************************************
ok: [master]
ok: [worker]TASK [Installing MicroK8s Snap Package] *************************************************************
[WARNING]: The value 1.19 (type float) in a string field was converted to '1.19' (type string). If
this does not look like what you expect, quote the entire value to ensure it does not change.
changed: [worker]
changed: [master]TASK [Adding vagrant user to microk8s group] *********************************************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]TASK [Giving vagrant user a permission to ~/.kube directory] ******************************
changed: [master]
changed: [worker]TASK [debug] *****************************************************************************************
ok: [master] => {
    "shell_result.stdout_lines": [
        "NAME            STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION",
        "ubuntu-bionic   Ready    <none>   6m40s   v1.19.0-34+09a4aa08bb9e93"
    ]
}
ok: [worker] => {
    "shell_result.stdout_lines": [
        "NAME            STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION",
        "ubuntu-bionic   Ready    <none>   6m48s   v1.19.0-34+09a4aa08bb9e93"
    ]
}PLAY RECAP *******************************************************************************************
master                     : ok=7    changed=4    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0   
worker                     : ok=7    changed=4    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0ansible-playbook -i hosts kubernetes.yml  11.74s user 1.41s system 13% cpu 1:39.82 total

Last Step:

# Adding a node to cluster
# Note: Make sure to change to hostname: ( hostnamectl set-hostname ubuntu-worker/master)# On Master Node
$ microk8s add-node
microk8s join 10.0.1.13:25000/62c7fa47f537f4425f5d4071f0688a71# On Worker Node
$ microk8s join 10.0.1.13:25000/62c7fa47f537f4425f5d4071f0688a71# Master Node
$ microk8s kubectl get nodes
NAME            STATUS     ROLES    AGE   VERSION
ubuntu-master   Ready      <none>   3m53s v1.19.0-34+09a4aa08bb9e93
ubuntu-worker   Ready      <none>   3m59s v1.19.0-34+09a4aa08bb9e93

Congratulations 🎊, You’ve just set up two ubuntu nodes with docker, portainer & Kubernetes cluster in less than a minute!!

Conclusion

Now, you’ve operational experience using vagrant and the virtual box together and set up both of them easily in any operating system. Also, you can effortlessly create VMs using vagrant to set up things like Docker, Kubernetes, and other more.

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