Customizing the Amount Of RAM in Our Vagrant VMs

The Vagrant box that we pick will default to some amount of RAM. During our development, we’ll run into situations where we need to increase that amount. To do that we’re going to introduce a new section that’s specific to VirtualBox. We can then set the amount of RAM (in Megabytes) using the memory configuration setting.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "generic/ubuntu2004"

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    # Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
    vb.memory = "4096"
  end
end

The fun part about this setting is that because we’re configuring resources for a VM and not a physical device we can easily give it memory amounts that would be hard to get into a physical device. For example, we could give our VM 3GB of RAM.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "generic/ubuntu2004"

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    # Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
    vb.memory = "3072"
  end
end

Now if reload our VM and ssh into it we can check and see we now have 3 GB of RAM.

$ free -mh
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          2.9Gi       452Mi       2.2Gi       3.0Mi       328Mi       2.3Gi
Swap:         1.9Gi          0B       1.9Gi

If you have questions related to vagrant or the PHP ecosystem in general you would like us to answer in future videos please ask them in the comments below.