Vagrant is the tool we are going to use for creating the development environment stack. It is an easy way to initialize ready-to-go virtual machines with minimum effort using preconfigured boxes. All boxes and configurations are placed in one file, called the Vagrant file.

Here is an example of creating a simple Ubuntu box. We made an extra configuration for installing MongoDB using Docker (the usage of Docker will be explained shortly). We assume that you have VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org) and Vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com) installed on your computer and that you have internet access.

In this particular case, we are creating an instance of Ubuntu 64-bits using the Ubuntu box (ubuntu/trusty64) and specifying that the VM should have 1 GB of RAM:

  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64" 
   
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb| 
  vb.memory = "1024" 
  end 

Further on, we're exposing MongoDB's default port in the Vagrant machine and running it using Docker:

  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 27017, host: 27017 
  config.vm.provision "docker" do |d| 
    d.run "mongoDB", image: "mongo:2", args: "-p 27017:27017" 
  end 

Finally, in order to speed up the Vagrant setup, we're caching some resources. You should install the plugin called cachier. For further information, visit: https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-cachier.

  if Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-cachier") 
    config.cache.scope = :box 
  end 

Now it's time to see it working. It usually takes a few minutes to run it for the first time because the base box and all the dependencies need to be downloaded and installed:

$> vagrant plugin install vagrant-cachier
$> git clone https://bitbucket.org/vfarcic/tdd-java-ch02-example-vagrant.git
$> cd tdd-java-ch02-example-vagrant
$> vagrant up

When this command is run, you should see the following output:

Be patient until the execution is finished. Once done, you'll have a new virtual machine with Ubuntu, Docker, and one MongoDB instance up and running. The best part is that all this was accomplished with a single command.

To see the status of the currently running VM, we can use the status argument:

$> vagrant status
Current machine states:
default                   running (virtualbox)
  

The virtual machine can be accessed either through ssh or by using Vagrant commands, as in the following example:

$> vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-46-generic x86_64)
   
 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/
  
 System information disabled due to load higher than 1.0
    
 Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
  http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
    
 0 packages can be updated.
 0 updates are security updates.
    
vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64:~$  

Finally, to stop the virtual machine, exit from it and run the vagrant halt command:

$> exit
$> vagrant halt
  ==> default: Attempting graceful shutdown of VM...
$>