Vagrant is an application that manages virtualized environments (boxes) allowing to control the creation and provisionning of virtual machines, which may share some resources (folders) with the host.
Vagrant supports different virtualization engines (providers), among which VirtualBox is historically the most popular.
Installation
Installation with libvirt
Libvirt is a good provider for Vagrant because it's faster than VirtualBox and it's in the main repository. Install it as follow:
sudo apt install vagrant-libvirt libvirt-daemon-system
Ensure your user is a member of the libvirt group (this is needed to manage libvirt via the qemu:///system uri, which is the default for vagrant-libvirt)
sudo usermod --append --groups libvirt $USER
logout and login so that your group membership applies
# should return libvirt groups | grep -o libvirt
start your first vagrant environment
vagrant init debian/buster64 vagrant up --provider=libvirt vagrant ssh
To change the default provider permanently one can add
export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=libvirt
to the users .profile or .bashrc.
Debian Vagrant base box
There is an ongoing effort to provide Teams/Cloud/VagrantBaseBoxes for Vagrant's cloud backend.
Creating Debian vagrant boxes
You also may wish to create your own Debian boxes, Debian currently uses fai-diskimage to build the boxes hosted on the Vagrant cloud.
Troubleshooting
Vagrant cannot be installed with Virtualbox 7 on Debian 11
If you use VirtualBox 7 (currently available from https://fasttrack.debian.net/ ), you need to install the vagrant package available in the bullseye-proposed-updates repository (version 2.2.14+dfsg-2), which includes a compatibility fix for VirtualBox 7.
Vagrant from Debian 11 or previous versions hang on "default: Waiting for SSH to become available..."
This is caused by a bug in Vagrant in the handling of ssh-rsa keys: Vagrant always try to connect to the VM using SHA-1 algorithm, although this algorithm has been removed from OpenSSH in version 8.8 (see that comment in the Debian Bug Tracker System). Workarounds (as of 2022-05-30) are:
- install the vagrant version from testing / Debian 12
- install ruby-net-ssh version 1:6.1.0-2+deb11u1 from stable-proposed-updates
- install ruby-net-ssh version 1:6.3.0~beta1+git20220405.dd7f11a-1~bpo11+1 (or higher) from bullseye-backports
Errors on NFS mount on Debian 8 and 9 boxes
During the vagrant up process you can get this error on Debian 8 as well as in Debian 9:
The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status. Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed! mount -o vers=4 192.168.121.1:/home/jhon/projects/foo /vagrant result=$? if test $result -eq 0; then if test -x /sbin/initctl && command -v /sbin/init && /sbin/init 2>/dev/null --version | grep upstart; then /sbin/initctl emit --no-wait vagrant-mounted MOUNTPOINT=/vagrant fi else exit $result fi Stdout from the command: Stderr from the command: mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting 192.168.121.1:/home/jhon/projects/foo
First of all ensure that your NFS daemon is running:
sudo systemctl status nfs-common sudo systemctl status nfs-kernel-server
Then copy from the above error the mount command and try running it on yourself, but downgrading the NFS version (the vers):
vagrant ssh sudo mount -o vers=3 192.168.121.1:/home/jhon/projects/foo /vagrant
If it works manually, than you can fix it adding this line into your Vagrantfile:
config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", nfs_version: "3"
Hang on "Waiting for domain to get an IP address..."
If vagrant seems to hang forever on this step:
Waiting for domain to get an IP address...
it might be worth killing that process (with control-c), then destroying the VM and starting again:
vagrant destroy vagrant up
It's unclear why, but sometimes this process doesn't succesfully complete in libvirt. It might be worth starting virt-manager to confirm the VM is running.
Failure to start on NFS
If you get this error message:
It appears your machine doesn't support NFS, or there is not an adapter to enable NFS on this machine for Vagrant. Please verify that `nfsd` is installed on your machine, and try again. If you're on Windows, NFS isn't supported. If the problem persists, please contact Vagrant support.
It's possible (and understandable) you haven't setup NFS (or haven't set it up correctly). A fairly simple workaround is to use *another* folder sharing plugin. There are multiple synced folder mechanisms in Vagrant. Unfortunately, changing the plugin requires you to edit the Vagrantfile (as opposed to just using a commandline argument). To switch to rsync, for example, you can simply use:
config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "rsync"
in your Vagrantfile. Note that this will not reflect changes in realtime between the VM and the host until you run the vagrant rsync command. The vagrant rsync-auto command can also do that in the background.
You can also use the "9p" (and virtiofs) module with:
config.vm.synced_folder './', '/vagrant', type: '9p', disabled: false, accessmode: "squash", owner: "1000"
See also the libvirt synced folders documentation.