- Read Tutorial
- Watch Guide Video
So you can go up to the very top and just type in VirtualBox and it's gonna bring up the main VirtualBox.org page
and you're gonna see a big Download button. DO NOT FOLLOW THAT ONE.
I wanna make sure that we're all using the correct version of VirtualBox so in the show notes, you will see a link that will take you to a very specific build. It's actually the 6.0 version build of VirtualBox but definitely feel free to look through the documentation.
Essentially what VirtualBox does is it allows us to have another environment on any type of machine. So even though we're on Windows, we could also be on a Mac, we could be on a Linux machine, we could be on any of them and what VirtualBox does is it allows us to take advantage of what's called virtualization. So it allows us to have a different virtual operating system even though we might be on a different operating system.
So because we wanna make sure that we're using all of the correct versions of tools like Node and React and Python and those kinds of things, it's very important that we have a baseline for our development environment and that's what VirtualBox does. We're not actually gonna be using VirtualBox, it's simply something we have to install and then in the next guide, we're gonna install a tool called Vagrant, Vagrant is what sits on top of VirtualBox.
But definitely, I recommend to go through the documentation, get familiar with it just so you know all of the tools that you're using. So I'm gonna go grab that link that I talked about and so you can grab that one as well. And I will paste that into the browser and go to that page. And you can see here that we have a list of all of these hosts.
Now, we want to use the Windows host, so if you're following along on Windows, if you happen to be on Mac, then you're gonna use that and Linux, you have all kinds of different options. So I'm gonna click on Windows hosts here and that's going to download it.
Now, depending on your internet speed, this may take a few moments to a few minutes. You can see it's about 163 megabytes and once it's downloaded, then we can install it.
So after that is completed, you can just click on it and this is going to open it up. And you'll see, I'll drag it over here, so we now have our Setup Wizard. And we can just click and accept all of the defaults, you don't have to make any changes here. You can have all of these shortcuts and everything as the default, hit next.
Now, after I click Yes here and this is very important, if you're following along as you're watching this online, this is probably gonna break your internet connection for a moment so just an FYI and when I click Yes, another big screen is gonna pop up and so you just accept that and confirm it when it asks you the questions. So I'm gonna click Yes, click Install and now it popped up the window asking if we wanna make changes to the device, I clicked Yes, and now it is installing.
So this is gonna just take a few moments to install VirtualBox. It says would you like to install the device software? Click on Install. And that's it. Now, after it's done, click Finish and this should open up VirtualBox on your system. Now, like I said, we're not gonna be having to use anything here.
The tool we're about to install in the next guide called Vagrant is going to leverage VirtualBox but it's going to spin up all of the machines that we're gonna be using as we're building out our applications but it's going to simply be using VirtualBox kind of like a backbone, like some type of foundation that allows for virtualization, so we can close out of that.
In the next guide, I will see you and we are going to install and configure Vagrant.