Installing VirtualBox and Vagrant

VirtualBox is a very important piece of software, which we refer to as a provider. Its job is to do the heavy lifting in creating and maintaining virtual machines and environments. Vagrant is essentially a wrapper around a provider (in our case, VirtualBox) and exposes a powerful API that allows you to create and manage virtual machines through code and configuration, such as the Vagrantfile.

Once VirtualBox is installed, we will have very little to do with it. It will sit in the background and await commands from Vagrant to manage virtual machines.

In this chapter, we will start to get our hands dirty with Vagrant. We will look at the following topics:

• Finding the version of your OS
• Finding your CPU architecture
• Installing VirtualBox on Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Installing Vagrant on Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Running Vagrant via the command line/Terminal to see which version of Vagrant you have

By the end of this chapter, you will have a fully working Vagrant and VirtualBox, ready to start creating virtual environments.