This article will cover installing Vagrant on Linux Mint, but what is Vagrant? Vagrant is a useful tool for setting up testing and development virtual machines on Linux. Setting it up on Debian and Ubuntu based distributions like Linux Mint is quite straight forward and the following guide will go over the main steps. For further information, Vagrant itself has some great docs http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/. It covers installation of Vagrant on various Linux distros as well as more advanced management and configuration, but here’s a quick start:

Installing Vagrant on Linux Mint

First, open up a terminal and install virtual box, the kernel sources and vagrant all in one neat step:

Please note that the version in Mint/Ubuntu’s repositories is not the latest one. If you’ve using tools such as PuPHPet you’ll need to grab the latest version of Vagrant from the Vagrant downloads page.

Make a new sub directory in your home folder for your Vagrant machines files to be stored in:

Now lets get create a VM. Pick what machine you want from the Vagrant Boxes (http://www.vagrantbox.es/). I’m going to use Debian 7.3. You need to copy the box URL.

Make sure you’re in your vagrant directory:

Initialise the vagrant box. This creates a configuration file for it which you can use to change key settings before you start it up

Make configuration changes if you want to. I like to set a hostname and have the machine appear on my main network so I can access it from other computers

These are the additional lines I put in:

# Setup a network bridge
config.vm.network :public_network

Now you can start the vagrant box. It’ll download the image first time so it might be a little slow to get going.

Once done, you can access it using