Vagrant

Vagrant Simplified

Shawn Powers — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 17:30:13 +0000

I admit it, some tools confuse me. I know they must be amazing, because programs don't get popular by being dumb (well, reality TV, but that's another story). I have the same sort of confusion with Vagrant that I have with Wine, Docker, Chef and countless other amazing tools people constantly rave about. So in this article, I'm going to break down Vagrant into its simplest form.

Don't get me wrong, I could follow along with the tutorials and get a virtual machine running by typing the magic vagrant up command. The thing is, I really don't like magic when it comes to computers. I like to know what is happening, why it's happening and where to look when things go wrong. Ultimately that's my goal, to be able to fix it when it breaks. Without an understanding of how things truly work, it gets really scary when the magic button quits working.

What It Is

Simply put, Vagrant is a front end to an underlying virtualization program. By default, the back-end program is VirtualBox, although Vagrant can work with other underlying virtualization systems. This realization was important for me, because the line between what had to be inside VirtualBox and what Vagrant actually did on its own was murky. If you use Vagrant, you don't ever need to start VirtualBox—truly. It won't hurt anything if you do start it, but Vagrant uses VirtualBox more like a tool than a system.

Another reason this is important is because it means there is no intermingled dependencies between Vagrant and VirtualBox. By that I mean you can take your Vagrantfiles to another computer, and it will work just fine. It simply will use the copy of VirtualBox you have installed on the new computer and work exactly the same.

When Does It Make Sense to Use Vagrant?

Much like brushing your teeth with a hairbrush doesn't make much sense, using Vagrant for setting up your permanent data center might not be the best idea. Sure, you could use it, but Vagrant really excels at building VMs very fast and destroying them when you're finished. In fact, most people use Vagrant for one of two things: creating a development environment to test their code and creating temporary servers on demand when the workload requires it.

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Vagrant

Richard Delaney — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:54:37 +0000

by Richard Delaney

How many times you have been hit by unit tests failing because of environment differences between you and other team members? How easy is it to build your project and have it ready for development? Vagrant provides a method for creating repeatable development environments across a range of operating systems for solving these problems. It is a thin layer that sits on top of existing technologies that allows people working on a project to reproduce development environments with a single command: vagrant up.

Vagrant is open-source software, and it sees lots of contributions from its community in every release. It was first released in 2010. Its founder Mitchell Hashimoto founded the company HashiCorp to work on Vagrant and a number of other DevOps tools in November 2012. HashiCorp has since released a number of other tools that are worth checking out, such as Packer, Consul and Serf. These are for different areas of the development lifecycle.

Vagrant uses virtual machines from various providers. It allows for easy configuration using a Vagrantfile. This allows development teams to set up the virtual machine the same way every time in a programmable fashion. This repeatability encourages developers to tear down and bring up environments more often. The development environment that all team members are developing against now can be "stored" in the version control system in such a way that anyone (new or otherwise) can have an environment set up after issuing a single command.

Continuous integration systems can use the same method. Building an environment and setting up a project in this way allows the developer to be sure that once other environments are provisioned in the same way, the project will run as it did in development. Environment-specific unit test failures is a class of problems completely removed by Vagrant.

Vagrant takes the building and provisioning of your software from tribal knowledge within your team to a reproducible provisioning script that is stored alongside your code. Others can read your Vagrantfile and provisioning scripts and have your project working on their system in minutes. This helps integrate new developers into your team quickly. It is easier to enable cross-team development within a larger company as it's easier to get up and running with a project. It also allows designers or technical writers to get quick access to your project without having to know any technical details about how to set up your project.

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Using Salt Stack and Vagrant for Drupal Development

Ben Hosmer — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:21:52 +0000

by Ben Hosmer

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that.

Or, what if, like Jake Epping in Stephen King's 11/22/63, you could make changes and script the past without fear, play around with some new Drupal modules, and quickly reset everything just by leaving and then walking back down the stairs of the pantry again?

Would you like to automate the creation and installation of a pristine Drupal environment, instead of manually installing Apache, PHP and all of the needed libraries?

Recently, I read a post from Treehouse Agency titled, "End 'Works on My Machine' Surprises with Vagrant", which is about using Vagrant and Puppet for Drupal development. You may have seen it as well on Drupal Planet and wondered about the benefits described there.

This is a great technique that outlines using various tools to build a consistent development environment quickly that is repeatable and shareable with everyone on your team.

Linux Journal also recently featured an article that introduced Vagrant. After you're finished here, I urge you to go read that one too, because it offers more general information about Vagrant itself.

Salt Stack is a tool similar to Puppet, but it's powered by Python, instead of Ruby. If you are interested in standalone Salt installation and use, check out my November 2012 LJ article on that topic, where I introduce Salt Stack and show how to install it to control one or thousands of other machines. I won't go in depth into Salt's installation here, because Salty-Vagrant takes care of all of that for you.

I've been using Salt, Vagrant and a Vagrant gem called Salty-Vagrant for Drupal development quite a bit lately. I've found that having a standard configuration that mirrors my development, testing, staging and production environments has streamlined my workflow and helped prevent a lot of the unknowns between different stages of the Drupal development life cycle. I've been able to minimize a lot of the errors and headaches that come with integrating multiple software stacks and speed up my workflow too.

I also enjoy being able to try new things quickly and easily without spending hours reconfiguring and re-installing the entire software stack needed for Drupal development.

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