How much disk space is needed to run a Vagrant VM?

The answer is: a lot.

If the base image is about 5Gb in ~/Downloads

• This will be copied to ~/.vagrant.d/boxes
• Then it will unpack to maybe 18Gb in ~/.vagrant.d/tmp
• vagrant up will cost you another 18Gb under ~/VirtualBox VMs

That’s a total of 46Gb free space needed, because Vagrant doesn’t clean up as it goes.

Tips:

• You can delete the original base image after provisioning
• Use a hard-drive space visualisation tool like GrandPerspective (Mac) or WinDirStat (Windows)