Vagrant boxes

Boxes are the package format for Vagrant environments. You specify a box environment and operating configurations in your Vagrantfile. You can use a box on any supported platform to bring up identical working environments. To enable teams to use and manage the same boxes, versions are supported.

The quickest way to get started is to select a pre-defined box environment from the publicly available catalog on Vagrant Cloud. You can also add and share your own customized boxes on Vagrant Cloud.

The vagrant box CLI utility provides all the functionality for box management. You can read the documentation on the vagrant box command for more information.

Discover boxes

To find boxes, explore the public Vagrant box catalog for a box that matches your use case. The catalog contains most major operating systems as bases, as well as specialized boxes to get you started with common configurations such as LAMP stacks, Ruby, and Python.

The boxes on the public catalog work with many different providers. The list of supported providers is located in the box descriptions.

Add a box

You can add a box from the public catalog at any time. The box's description includes instructions on how to add it to an existing Vagrantfile or initiate it as a new environment on the command-line.

A common misconception is that a namespace like "ubuntu" represents the official space for Ubuntu boxes. This is untrue. Namespaces on Vagrant Cloud behave very similarly to namespaces on GitHub. Just as GitHub's support team is unable to assist with issues in someone's repository, HashiCorp's support team is unable to assist with third-party published boxes.

Official boxes

There are only two officially-recommended box sets.

HashiCorp publishes a basic Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit box that is available for minimal use cases. It is highly optimized, small in size, and includes support for VirtualBox, Hyper-V, and VMware.

To get started, use the init command to initialize your environment.

$ vagrant init hashicorp/bionic64

If you have an existing Vagrantfile, add hashicorp/bionic64.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "hashicorp/bionic64"
end

For other base operating system environments, we recommend the Bento boxes. The Bento boxes are open source and built for a number of providers including VMware, VirtualBox, and Parallels. There are a variety of operating systems and versions available.

Special thanks to the Bento project for providing a solid base template for the hashicorp/bionic64 box.

It is often a point of confusion but Canonical, the company that makes the Ubuntu operating system, publishes boxes under the "ubuntu" namespace on Vagrant Cloud. These boxes only support VirtualBox.

Create a box

If you are unable to find a box that meets your specific use case, you can create one. We recommend that you first create a base box to have a clean slate to start from when you build future development environments.

Learn more about box formats to get started.