To make the tutorial self-contained, a Vagrant file is provided. Vagrant makes it easy to bootstrap barebones virtual machines with VirtualBox.

In order to run Vagrant, you need:

• VirtualBox installed
• Ruby installed (should be on your system already)
• Vagrant 1.1+ installed (see http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/installation/index.html).

This should be all it takes to set up Vagrant.

Now bootstrap your virtual machines with the following command. Note that you do not need to download any "box" manually. This tutorial already includes a Vagrantfile to get you up and running, and will get one for you if needed.

vagrant up

and go grab yourself a coffee (note that if you use vagrant-hostmaster, you'll need to type your password since it needs to sudo as root).

If something goes wrong, refer to Vagrant's Getting Started Guide.

To follow this tutorial, you'll need to have your keys in VMs root's authorized_keys. While this is not absolutely necessary (Ansible can use sudo, password authentication, etc...), it will make things way easier.

Ansible is perfect for this and we will use it for the job. However I won't explain what's happening for now. Just trust me.

ansible-playbook -c paramiko -i step-00/hosts step-00/setup.yml --ask-pass --sudo

When asked for password, enter vagrant. If you get "Connections refused" errors, please check the firewall settings of your machine.

To polish things up, it's better to have an ssh-agent running, and add your keys to it (ssh-add).

Now head to the first step in step-01.