In this page, you will learn how to configure your local machine to run virtual machine that is provisioned with Vagrant. The provisioned guest machine is running on Debian 12 (Bookworm) with all the tools to run any of the code sections without configuring your own machine to do any of these. Also, the author would make sure that all the code that is shared will work no matter what.

To start with, we need a hypervisor, and we plan to use VirtualBox just because it’s simplicity. Both Vagrant and VirtualBox are free to download from their websites.

If both Vagrant and VirtualBox are ready to be used in your terminal of your choice, you can run the first Vagrant command to initialize a file named Vagrantfile in your current directory. If you want to store this file in a dedicated directory, for now, we can call it dev-machine.

vagrant init debian/testing64

This will create the Vagrantfile that we will change with the following.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "earth", primary: true do |server|
    server.vm.box = "debian/bookworm64"

    server.vm.provider :libvirt do |guest|
      guest.cpus = 2
      guest.memory = 2048
    end

    server.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.33.10"

    #
    # build-essential: compilers and other tools to create packages on Debian
    # cmake: cross-platform build system to build
    # libopenmpi-dev: includes both MPI development headers and binaries
    #
    server.vm.provision :shell, inline: <<-SHELL
      apt-get update
      apt-get install -y build-essential cmake libopenmpi-dev
    SHELL
  end
end

Now, we can run following command to start the virtual machine.

vagrant up

Vagrant will download the virtual machine image, and then run the provision script. Whenever it is done, we can run following command to get into the SSH session

vagrant ssh