Vagrant and Ansible

Vagrant is a tool for automating the creation of virtual machines using either Virtualbox or VMware. Of course, automating the creation of a VM is only half of the battle – once you have one you need to configure it. That’s where Ansible comes in.

Ansible is a third generation configuration tool (think Puppet or Chef, but easier), allowing you to install software and configure things as you need in an automated manor. Once we can spin up VM’s and provision them with software automatically, we add some form of predictability to our environments.

This talk introduces everyone to Vagrant and Ansible, and walks through creating an initial VM that installs PHP, Apache2 and configures an example website with a custom VirtualHost.