This plugin gives knife the ability to create, bootstrap, and manage Vagrant instances.
The plugin is a rewrite of the original knife-vagrant but more closely resembles knife-ec2 behaviour. Specifically it does not use Vagrant's built in Chef provisioner and instead relies on knife to bootstrap the VM. It will work nicely with knife-solo and doesn't require a Chef server.
If you are using bundler, simply add Chef and knife-vagrant2 to your Gemfile:
gem 'chef'
gem 'knife-vagrant2'If you are not using bundler, you can install the gem manually:
$ gem install knife-vagrant2
knife-vagrant2 creates a /vagrant subfolder in your project which it uses to manage Vagrant files for all the instances you launch. You should add this folder to your .gitignore file so it is never checked into version control.
To launch a new VM use the server create command:
knife vagrant server create --box-url http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box -N db -r role[db]
This will launch a new VM using the precise32 box, give the node a Chef name of db and then use knife to provision the VM with the db role.
If a box is already installed into vagrant use --box instead of --box-url to reference it.
By default knife-vagrant2 picks a private IP address from a predefined pool and assigns it to the VM. You can specify the IP pool using --subnet or assign a specfic IP with --private-ip-address.
To map folders between host and VM use --share-folders NAME::GUEST_PATH::HOST_PATH.
After a VM has been created its Chef name is used to reference it in future commands. Most commands map directly to the Vagrant ones:
knife vagrant server suspend SERVER [SERVER]
knife vagrant server resume SERVER [SERVER]
knife vagrant server halt SERVER [SERVER]
knife vagrant server up SERVER [SERVER]
knife vagrant server delete SERVER [SERVER] (options)
knife vagrant server list
All commands can be applied to one or more VMs.