Using Vagrant to manage development and production environments?

Question

How are people handling simple automation (with puppet) for dev / prod environments with vagrant (ideally from the same vagrantfile)?

Use case I'm trying to solve

• I would love to spin up the the production machine with vagrant if it isn't created.
• I would love to reload nginx or apache confs on production with vagrant if they were tweaked in the puppet files for my dev environment.

The Problem

When you call vagrant up with a provider like AWS or Digital Ocean, it becomes the active provider and you can't switch. You get this error:

An active machine was found with a different provider. Vagrant currently allows each machine to be brought up with only a single provider at a time. A future version will remove this limitation. Until then, please destroy the existing machine to up with a new provider.

It seems the answer it to destroy, but I just need to switch. I don't want to destroy.

I would love to be able to say

vagrant up prod

or

vagrant reload prod

and then a simple vagrant up would fall back to the default machine.

This syntax is similar to how multiple machines work, but I don't want to spin up a dev and production environment when I just call vagrant up (which is the default behavior).

Should I be looking at packer as part of the workflow? I watched the whole talk at puppetconf 2013 on Mitchell's talk on Multi-Provider http://puppetlabs.com/presentations/multi-provider-vagrant-aws-vmware-and-more

I'm still not seeing a solution for my problem.

---

UPDATE 9/27/13

In case anybody else is fighting this idea, this article cleared up a lot of questions I had. http://pretengineer.com/post/packer-vagrant-infra

Answer 1

As for workaround, you should define config.vm.define (as suggested here), in order to support multiple providers.

Please find the following configuration posted by @kzap as example:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|

  # Store the current version of Vagrant for use in conditionals when dealing
  # with possible backward compatible issues.
  vagrant_version = Vagrant::VERSION.sub(/^v/, '')

  # Configuration options for the VirtualBox provider.
  def configure_vbox_provider(config, name, ip, memory = 2048, cpus = 1)
    config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |v, override| 
      # override box url
      override.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
      # configure host-only network
      override.vm.hostname = "#{name}.dev"
      override.vm.network :private_network, id: "vvv_primary", ip: ip

      v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, 
        "--memory", memory,
        "--cpus", cpus,
        "--name", name,
        "--natdnshostresolver1", "on",
        "--natdnsproxy1", "on"
      ]
    end
  end

  default_provider = "virtualbox"
  supported_providers = %w(virtualbox rackspace aws managed)
  active_provider = ENV['VAGRANT_ACTIVE_PROVIDER'] # it'd be better to get this from the CLI --provider option
  supported_providers.each do |provider|
  next unless (active_provider.nil? && provider == default_provider) || active_provider == provider

    #
    # VM per provider
    #
    config.vm.define :"sample-#{provider}" do | sample_web_config |

      case provider
      when "virtualbox"
        configure_vbox_provider(sample_web_config, "examine-web", "192.168.50.1")

      when "aws"
        configure_aws_provider(sample_web_config)

      when "managed"
        configure_managed_provider(sample_web_config, "1.2.3.4")

      when "rackspace"
        configure_rackspace_provider(sample_web_config)  

      end
  end

end

Or the following example posted at gist by @maxlinc:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

# Vagrantfile API/syntax version. Don't touch unless you know what you're doing!
VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "dummy"

  config.vm.provider :rackspace do |rs|
    rs.username = ENV['RAX_USERNAME']
    rs.api_key  = ENV['RAX_API_KEY']
    rs.rackspace_region   = :ord
  end

  supported_providers = %w(virtualbox rackspace)
  active_provider = ENV['VAGRANT_ACTIVE_PROVIDER'] # it'd be better to get this from the CLI --provider option
  supported_providers.each do |provider|
    next unless active_provider.nil? || active_provider == provider

    config.vm.define "exact_name_#{provider}" do |box|
      box.vm.provider :rackspace do |rs|
        rs.flavor = '1 GB Performance'
        rs.image  = 'Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) (PVHVM)'
      end
    end

    config.vm.define "regex_#{provider}" do |box|
      box.vm.provider :rackspace do |rs|
        rs.flavor = /1\s+GB\s+Performance/
        rs.image  = /Ubuntu.*Trusty Tahr.*(PVHVM)/
      end
    end

    config.vm.define "id_#{provider}" do |box|
      box.vm.provider :rackspace do |rs|
        rs.flavor = 'performance1-1'
        rs.image  = 'bb02b1a3-bc77-4d17-ab5b-421d89850fca'
      end
    end

    config.vm.define "unlisted_#{provider}" do |box|
      box.vm.provider :rackspace do |rs|
        rs.flavor = 'performance1-1'
        rs.image = '547a46bd-d913-4bf7-ac35-2f24f25f1b7a'
      end
    end
  end
end