Problem

Training often falls foul of the ‘it doesn’t work for me’ problem. This is commonly caused by students having subtly different setups to those expected by the course material. We will set up an environment that will eliminate this problem using virtual machines and course material supplied to build specific environments from scratch.

Solution

We will use two tools that will allow use to create standard environments to be used during any course, module, or lecture without interfering with your computer’s setup. The tools you need are:

1. vagrant available from Hashicorp. Simply download and install this as detailed on the VagrantUp website.

2. virtualbox available from Oracle. Simply download and install this as detailed on the VirtualBox website.

While having these two tools installed on your computer is required you may also want to install git. This simplifies somewhat obtaining and updating course materials. git is available from https://git-scm.com, simply download and install it as described on the website.

If you choose not to use git you can download zip packages from the course material repository instead. Each course, module, or lecture that requires new materials will start with instructions on obtaining the materials both using git and downloading the zip.

Discussion

virtualbox is a free virtual machine system provided by Oracle. It is widely used, free and available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

vagrant is a tool for creating, provisioning, and managing virtual machines. It is ideally suited to our needs here as is allows courses to specify how to build a virtual machine (or machines) suitable for the course. Using these standard virtual machines ensures that all students are working in a ‘known’ environment thereby removing and potential difficulties arising from minor differences that are inevitable when using a students own machine environment.

git is a widely used version control tool. If you are intending a career in IT it is almost certain you will be using git at some point, so it is useful to have it installed on your machine regardless of taking SaltyVagrant courses. That said, unlike vagrant and virtualbox it is possible to follow courses without git.