Provision VPS with Vagrant and VMware Fusion
At the time of writing, in November 2024, setting up a local VPS on a MacBooks powered by Apple silicon chips is not very straight forward. VirtualBox virtualization application not yet has Apple silicon support.
In this tutorial I have captured a step by step guide for provisioning local VPS servers on MacBook Pro with Apple silicon.
I use VPS servers to run multiple applications.
Staging and production environments in the most cases run on the cloud platforms (like DigitalOcean or Hetzner), where I deploy number of virtual private servers and dedicated servers.
However, for development and playground environments my preference is to use my local MacBook Pro, which has plenty of computing power in it.
By using tools mentioned in this tutorial, I have automated the spin up of multiple VPS instances on local development machine.
However, at the moment of writing, for newer MacBooks with Apple silicon chips in them (M1/M2/M3..) the setup of such local VPS environment requires a few steps.
This tutorial walks you through the steps I use to setup local VPS instances on Apple silicon MacBook Pro by using Vagrant, VMware and plugins.
Tools
I'm using the following tools.
Vagrant - its a tool allows to create reproducible environments by storing configurations as code.
VMware Fusion - is a desktop hypervisor which supports MacBook hardware with both Intel and Apple chips. It's free for personal use.
Another popular option for desktop hypervisor is VirtualBox but currently it's lacking support for Apple silicon chips.
Homebrew which is a great package manager for macOS. Helps to take control of what you have installed on your development machine.
1. Install VMware Fusion
As first step, we will install VMware Fusion.
VMware Fusion is a commercial desktop hypervisor for macOS. With a good support for with Apple silicon. Its free for personal use.
Go to VMware download site and sign up / download / install.
2. Install Vagrant
Next, install Vagrant.
Vagrant is built as distributed as binary package for different platforms. They provide downloads page or on Mac you can use Homebrew.
I use Homebrew. After install is completed, you will have vagrant CLI command available. Run the following
brew tap hashicorp/tap
brew install hashicorp/tap/hashicorp-vagrant
vagrant -v
vagrant -h
3. Vagrant provider for VMware
Next we have to connect Vagrant to VMware Fusion.
Makers of Vagrant, maintain an official Vagrant provider for VMware.
Installation of the Vagrant VMware provider is done in two steps. First, download and install Vagrant VMware Utility from the official page.
Second, we will install Vagrant VMware provider plugin via vagrant CLI itself.
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-desktop
Once above steps are completed, we are good to create local VPS servers.
4. Provision VPS on your Mac
Creating new VPS is relatively simple.
There are large number of public images (or Vagrant boxes) available on Vagrant Cloud. We will use bento/debian-12-arm64 for this tutorial.
Create a dedicated directory on your machine. Run the following Vagrant init command which will create you a simple Vagrantfile in that directory. And finlay vagrant up will start your VPS.
mkdir vagrant-test
cd vagrant-test
vagrant init bento/debian-12-arm64 --box-version 202404.23.0
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
Once you finished using the VPS, simply run vagrant destroy. Next time, vagrant up will build you exactly the same VPS.
Use vagrant ssh to connect to VPS via ssh client
5. Configuring VPS
Within Vagrantfile you can provide specific configurations which will be applied to your VPS.
Its a good option as you can pre configure VPS and get this applied every time you start it by Vagrant.
In the next tutorial part I'm going to create summary of popular configuration options.