As defined by Wikipedia, a virtual machine is the virtualization of a computer system. Virtual machines have their CPU, memory, and operating system and can act independently of the host.
Virtual machines are especially useful in this age of large multi-user applications that require continuous updates from various teams across various departments. Virtual machines help mitigate complications due to the difference in the host machine's hardware specifications.
Prerequisites
To get started with this article, we must have the following:
- Virtualization Technology (VT) enabled in BIOS. To understand how to enable VT, check out this article
- A Command line interface (CLI) installed on the computer. For Windows users, it is advisable to use GIT Bash to run the vagrant commands. To download GIT Bash, check out this page
- A virtualization product like VirtualBox, install VirtualBox from here
- A code editor
Creating a Centos7 virtual machine
To create our virtual machine, we run this terminal command to create a directory that will house our project.
mkdir <name of our project>
Next, we change the current directory to our newly created directory.
cd <name of our project>
After creating our project directory, we create a directory that will hold our website template.
mkdir <name of our website>
We then change our current directory to our website directory.
cd <name of our website>
Creating virtual machines using vagrant box
Vagrant boxes are packaged ready-made vagrant environments that can be downloaded and used to create virtual machines. We discover vagrant boxes from the Vagrant cloud.
In this article, we will use the geerlingguy/centos7 virtual box.
This terminal command creates a vagrant file with the 'geerlingguy/centos7' virtual box.
vagrant init geerlingguy/centos7
We should see this in our terminal.
Next, we go to the newly created Vagrantfile file on our laptop and open it up with any available code editor.
The Vagrantfile contains this information.
Next, we uncomment the following lines:
- line 35 : The
config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.10"line contains the IP address that we use to access our website -
line 40: The
config.vm.network "public_network"line gives us a dynamic IP address - line 52, line 57, line 58: These lines give our virtual machine more RAM as the default CentOS 7 RAM is 512MB.
Here is how our Vagrantfile looks:
Next, we save the Vagrantfile and start the virtual machine. Start up the virtual machine with this terminal command.
vagrant up
We then log in to the virtual machine.
vagrant ssh
Next, we change to the root user.
sudo -i
Next, we install the httpd, wget, and unzip packages with this command.
yum install httpd wget unzip -y
These packages do the following:
- httpd: The httpd package plays the role of a server in our application
- wget: The wget package will download the website template
- unzip : The unzip package will unzip the downloaded template
After installing our packages, we start our server and enable it so that the server will come up when the virtual machine boots up.
systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd
To access our website IP address, we run this terminal command.
ip addr
Next, we copy the 'inet' IP address and paste it into our browser to see the default page.
Use the 'inet' IP address in the "3:" section. In the picture above, we use 192.168.33.10.
We should see this page in our browser.
Getting the website template
In this section of the tutorial, we are going to get the download link to a website template and download the template in our project.
To get the download link, follow these steps:
Go to the tooplate website and choose a template
Click ctrl shift i to open up the chrome console
Navigate to the Network tab and click the download button on the template page.
In the Network tab, click on the zip file, and copy the Request URL. This Request URL is the download link to the website template
Downloading the website template in our project
We change the current directory to the /tmp/ directory in our project.
cd /tmp/
The /tmp/ directory is a temporary landing place for files, and it will be responsible for holding our website template in the meantime.
To download the website template, run this terminal command.
wget <link to the website template we copied>
To verify that we have successfully downloaded the website template, run this terminal command.
ls
We then unzip this file with this command.
unzip <name of the zip file>
To see our unzipped file, run this command.
ls
To see all the files and directories in our unzipped file, we change the directory to our unzipped file and run the ls command.
cd <name of your unzipped website template>
ls
Hosting the website in our virtual machine
We store the HTML files we see when we navigate to our inet IP address in the /var/www/html directory. In the /var/www/html directory, the first file the server renders by default is the index.html.
To see our website in the browser, we copy the files in the unzipped template to our /var/www/html directory. Run this command to copy each file and directory to the /var/www/html directory.
cp -r * /var/www/html
To verify that we successfully copied the files and directories, change the current directory to /var/www/html and run the ls command.
cd /var/www/html
ls
Next, we restart our server to see the changes in our browser.
Conclusion
This article discussed downloading and hosting a website template on a CentOS 7 virtual machine.
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