Vagrant is a great tool from HashiCorp to test ideas without polluting your computer with software you aren’t going to need afterward. This is also an easy way to test simple cluster setups like an Elasticsearch cluster config. In order to build a cluster, you create a Vagrantfile like this one:
It defines 5 virtual machines with static IPs. As there are no provisionning defined we will have to connect to each box separatly and repeat the same commands like sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. If my ubuntu/trusty64 box is pretty old, it is going to take some time and I will download 5 times the same packages. In order to circumvent the issue, we can do it once, create a box and use this box instead of ubuntu/trusty64. Here is an example of Vagrantfile
We run vagrant up and let it provision a box for us updating the OS, installing java, elasticsearch and Kibana. Once done I can run the command:
vagrant package --output ubuntu-es.box
This will create a file ubuntu-es.box that we can now add to our local list of known boxes:
vagrant box add --name ubuntu-es ubuntu-es.box
We can now update our initial Vagrantfile for the elasticsearch boxes:
Have fun creating your own boxes!