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Here's what I wish I'd known before using Vagrant: 1. How to properly do cross-platform, high-performance two-way synced folders between host and guest. Most p

• throwanem 9y ago
  I've had much better results mounting host directories via sshfs than I ever have with shared folders. Cygwin sshd works on Windows; there are probably faster ones, but I've never felt the need to bother.
  • scrollaway 9y ago
    I've been meaning to look into vagrant-sshfs but the fact it requires extra setup (quite a bit of it on Windows) has put me off. Our vagrant setup right now is "Install Vagrant, Virtualbox, run this one command and you're done".
    • brandonwamboldt 9y ago
      We get around the shared folder performance problem using NFS. Adds one extra step to setup (mount a network share), but we've never had performance issues with it.
      • ishtu 9y ago
        Depends on case, for me NFS performance (MacOS as host, Linux as guest) is a major PITA and source of instability in vagrant dev setup.
        • cat199 9y ago
          Not so familiar with vagrant on mac (though my time is coming), but having used loopback KVM's on rhel I can say that fiddling with mount options can drastically improve stability / performance (though still much slower) e.g. tcp mounts, getting read/write blocks matched up btw/client server and sized to be digestable but big enough to move data, etc. also, nfs is mainly only suited for 'NAS-like' operations - things like rdbms's do waay better on iscsi or eating the vdisk performance. last I messed with macos nfsd (which has been a while), it a way happier with smaller blocksizes (e.g. 8-64k range) - modern linuces will attempt 1MB which is too much for the older 4.4BSD based code another thing to look at is timeouts / backoffs - it's easy to kill performance by setting these things too agressively so that the system double-chokes when it gets bogged down..
      • to3m 9y ago
        I used NFS when using vagrant shared folders a lot a couple of years ago. Didn't really pay much attention to the performance, I must admit, which was fine for my purposes; for me it only really needed to crash less than the default shared folder stuff... I did have to supply an extra "mount_options:['actimeo']=1" option to the synced_folder command to make file watcher-type systems work tolerably. With the defaults I'd often be waiting several seconds before any changes made by the host would be picked up by the guest.
• nicky0 9y ago
  Resilio Sync? (Formerly BitTorrent Sync)
  • Viper007Bond 9y ago
    Check out Syncthing. It's way better and open source.
    • nicky0 9y ago
      Thanks for the tip. Trying out Syncthing and I love it. It's made for me.
• conanbatt 9y ago
  >1. How to properly do cross-platform, high-performance two-way synced folders between host and guest. Most providers only support one-way syncing. Virtualbox has shared folders, but their performance is pretty lousy and they have issues with relative symlinks. In fact, I still don't fully know what the correct setup is for a dev environment where the files are edited on the host and the guest immediately picks up on them... I set up a TCP server, one light process watches file changes and the other side reacts to it. (Rails). It was one of my silent victories that the entire company used, but I had to do because I was the guinnea pig on the vagrant migration.
  • linkregister 9y ago
    How do you watch for file system changes on Linux? Spinning loop? On Windows you can register a handler/callback, is that available in Linux?
    • adamtulinius 9y ago
      Check out inotify (built into the kernel).
    • conanbatt 9y ago
      I remember we tried to use something native like inotify, but it didnt work for vagrant or something. I ended up using the Listen gem.
• stephenr 9y ago
  2 has been a big issue with a recent client because Virtualbox is a fucking pig in terms of features and performance compared to the commercial alternatives. My advice is to cough up an hour or two salary and pay for parallels or VMware (if on Mac)
  • cobbzilla 9y ago
    at least in the US, anything work-related that you pay for out of pocket is tax-deductible if your employer doesn't reimburse you or you're self-employed.
    • snuxoll 9y ago
      Doesn't make a lick of difference if you lack enough itemized deductions, otherwise you take the standard deduction like everybody else. Honestly though, VMWare is pretty cheap. VMWare Workstation Player and VMWare Fusion aren't cheap upfront, but the upgrade pricing to stay current is decent - I spend more on my JetBrains licenses every year. It's worth it to have a fast and mostly headache-free virtualization experience.
  • cjsuk 9y ago
    Also a recommendation here against Hyper V.
    • RussianCow 9y ago
      Can you elaborate?
      • zerkten 9y ago
        At least for me, using Hyper-V is problematic because I can't also run VMware Workstation at the same time. I have to boot into different configurations to run them side-by-side. My macOS experience is that running both on your machine is straightforward.
        • 9y ago
• camhenlin 9y ago
  I find that Vagrant works relatively similarly between Mac and Linux to the point where "it just works", but Windows is a whole different ballgame with shared directories and symlinks. On the current software that I'm working on for example, the first step of the onboarding process for new developers using Windows, is to install Linux, which seems pretty insane for something that lives inside of a VM!
• dannyhw 9y ago
  Are you talking about symlinks on synced folders? I absolutely love synced folders, but the whole idea is fundamentally incompatible with symlinks. Think about the VM actually interpreting the link and resolving the path against its own filesystem. Just doesn't make sense. If you want that, share the directory on the host and mount it in your VM so it's your host resolving the link. My experience with Vagrant is that it's amazing, but I've only used it for a web application with Github and Jenkins for CI. Dev team doesn't have to spend a second thinking outside the git repo.
• bradgessler 9y ago
  The same is true for cross-platform Docker. 1. On macOS, host FS volumes are two magnitudes slower. There are a series of hacks that try to mitigate this problem and progress has been made, but it’s still too slow for a dev environment. Linux doesn’t have this problem. I don’t know about Windows. 2. Also on macOS, the host networking bridge doesn’t work the same way it works on Linux. There’s a different hostname that’s used to access the host from within the container that’s inconsistent with Docker on Linux. Docker is working through these issues, but they’ve been ongoing for years. I’ve written about Docker dev macOS environments at bradgessler.com, but have given up mostly because FS performance is so poor. Now I spin up what I call “Dockerish” dev environments where my service dependencies run in Docker and the app runs on my host.
  • lewisl9029 9y ago
    Regarding 1), Docker implemented a cached volume mount option to mitigate the performance issues on MacOS [1], but last time I tried it, file system events stopped working. I'm not sure if this is an inherent limitation or if it's something specific to my environment. I'd appreciate if someone more knowledgeable could clarify. As for Windows, it doesn't have the same fs performance issues on volume mounts, but AFAIK file system events have never worked there [2]. My current reluctant compromise to make volume mounts work seamlessly across platforms is to use polling instead of relying on file system events. That way I can turn on caching on Docker for Mac, and everything just works. The downside is of course polling is inefficient, but I've found when you take care to exclude all non-source directories from the polling, it's usually not as bad as you'd think. [1] https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs-caching/#tuning-with-consistent-cached-and-delegated-configurations https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs-caching/#tuning... [2] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/56#issuecomment-242135705 https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/56#issuecomment-242...
  • giobox 9y ago
    Given Docker for Mac controls an internal VM instance to actually run the containers, is there much benefit over just using Docker in a Linux VM? It's pretty easy these days to use tools like Vagrant to spin up the VM then run a Docker Compose file or whatever to get your development environment ready, and would result in identical cross platform environments.
• vultour 9y ago
  What I do on some projects (not using vagrant) is install samba on the dev VM so that it can be mounted from a Windows workstation. Obviously much simpler and easier to do if you're developing on Linux (nfs / sshfs).
• dcosson 9y ago
  I hesitate to call it the correct setup because I think only a small number of people use it, but the only solution I've found for Virtualbox that 1. does 2-way sync between host & guest 2. Propagates fs events (so you can run an auto-reloading service like webpack-dev-server on the guest that picks up changes on your host) and 3. is not significantly slower at disk reads & writes, is using Unison which is basically a 2-way rsync. There's this Vagrant extension [0] that works pretty well on mac at least (which I actually forked and pushed to rubygems a few years ago when I discovered it because it had been abandoned and no longer worked) Unfortunately the Vagrant team seems to have no interest in having all 3 of the properties I mentioned just work out of the box, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just a lack of resources at Hashicorp, I'm not sure how much dev time they put into Vagrant these days since it's otherwise very mature and they have such a large number of open source projects. [0] https://github.com/dcosson/vagrant-unison2 https://github.com/dcosson/vagrant-unison2
  • jitl 9y ago
    Thank you for your work! I used your vagrant-unison2 plugin for developer environments at Airbnb for a time, although we've now moved on to a more complex, home-grown Unison wrapper with Watchman for filesystem watches.
    • smc12 9y ago
      Are there any plans to open-source this Unison wrapper?
  • e12e 9y ago
    This looks very interesting - unison is a great tool. I rember fighting to get plan9 networking working with qemu/kvm and Linux, and never quite figuring out how to connect the dots. On paper it appears 9p should be a perfect fit for the use-case. (However, I just found [1] - maybe I'll give it another shot). But it seems kind of obvious that the functionality needed to get this stuff to work, is an entire network filesystem stack. It seems the obvious choices would be to build into VirtualBox either nfs, or webdav - or leverage host/external support for nfs, cifs, or something like OpenAFS. With sshfs as another pragmatic option. Maybe in the future ipfs will be a viable option too. But I think cifs is still the "mostly works, with/without complex auth, cross platform" - with webdav a distant second. [1] https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html
• phs 9y ago
  I've been struggling with 1) for years. My current attempt is to exploit ZFS snapshot shipping, since modern ZFS ports are available for both mac and linux (and apparently one for windows is on the way). Unlike rsync, ZFS always knows what's changed since the last snapshot, so there's no directory scanning. Unlike inotify, there is (seemingly) no(?) risk of dropped events, which I've experienced with tools like watchman. My ZFS solution still needs prompting event to start the snapshot, but it no longer needs to be told _what_ changed. Critically the sync flows in one direction. This is a deal breaker for applications that need to communicate file changes back out to the host, but that hasn't been an issue in my use cases. Unlike NFS, it also means we must (and can) relax the strong consistency model, and so using the filesystem is not so latency bound. This becomes important if the virtual machine is not running locally..
• amiga-workbench 9y ago
  You can just use NFS instead of Virtualbox's integrated folder sharing, it pretty much completely resolves the performance issues.