vagrant/docs/getting-started/introduction.md

layout	title
getting_started	Getting Started - Introduction

Introduction

This initial section will introduce the binaries and Vagrantfile, which are used extensively in controlling Vagrant. The remainder of the getting started guides assumes this basic knowledge.

Vagrant Binaries

Once Vagrant is installed, it is typically controlled through the vagrant command line interface. Vagrant comes with around 10 separate binaries, all prefixed with vagrant, such as vagrant-up, vagrant-ssh, and vagrant-package. These are known as git style binaries (since they mimic git). Taking it one step further, the hyphen between the commands are optional. To call vagrant-up for example, you could just do vagrant up and the two commands would behave the exact same way.

The Vagrantfile

A Vagrantfile is to Vagrant as a Makefile is to Make. The Vagrantfile exists at the root of any Vagrant project and is used to configure and specify the behavior of Vagrant and the virtual machine it creates. A basic Vagrantfile is embedded below so you can get a brief idea of how it looks:

{% highlight ruby %} Vagrant::Config.run do |config|

Setup the box

config.vm.box = "my_box" end {% endhighlight %}

As you can see, a Vagrantfile is simply Ruby code which typically contains a Vagrant configuration block. For most commands, Vagrant will first load the project's Vagrantfile for configuration.