Boxes

Boxes are the package format for Vagrant environments. A box can be used by anyone on any platform that Vagrant supports to bring up an identical working environment.

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

The easiest way to use a box is to add a box from the publicly available catalog of Vagrant boxes. You can also add and share your own customized boxes on this website.

Boxes also support versioning so that members of your team using Vagrant can update the underlying box easily, and the people who create boxes can push fixes and communicate these fixes efficiently.

You can learn all about boxes by reading this page as well as the sub-pages in the navigation to the left.

Discovering Boxes

The easiest way to find boxes is to look on the public Vagrant box catalog for a box matching your use case. The catalog contains most major operating systems as bases, as well as specialized boxes to get you up and running quickly with LAMP stacks, Ruby, Python, etc.

The boxes on the public catalog work with many different providers. Whether you are using Vagrant with VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, etc. you should be able to find a box you need.

Adding a box from the catalog is very easy. Each box shows you instructions with how to add it, but they all follow the same format:

$ vagrant box add USER/BOX

For example: vagrant box add hashicorp/precise64. You can also quickly initialize a Vagrant environment with vagrant init hashicorp/precise64.

Namespaces do not guarantee canonical boxes! A common misconception is that a namespace like "ubuntu" represents the canonical space for Ubuntu boxes. This is untrue. Namespaces on Vagrant Cloud behave very similarly to namespaces on GitHub, for example. 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

HashiCorp (the makers of Vagrant) publish a basic Ubuntu 12.04 (32 and 64-bit) box that is available for minimal use cases. It is highly optimized, small in size, and includes support for Virtualbox and VMware. You can use it like this:

$ vagrant init hashicorp/precise64

or you can update your Vagrantfile as follows:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "hashicorp/precise64"
end

For other users, 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.

These are the only two officially-recommended box sets.

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 and do not provide an ideal experience for most users. If you encounter issues with these boxes, please try the Bento boxes instead.