5 ms·

Vagrant is a tool for building virtualized development environments.

85 points by lox 16y ago

andrewvc 16y ago
I use vagrant every day, it's really a must-have for a complex stack.
mitchellh 16y ago
Why hello there! I'm the maintainer/developer behind Vagrant and I'm happy to answer any questions there may be about the project whether it be conceptual or directly related to how Vagrant works. I didn't expect to see this on HN today but I guess I'll just give a giant information dump here for those interested :) Good links for those interested in what Vagrant is: * "Why Vagrant?" - http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/why.html http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/why.html * "Frequently Asked Questions" - http://vagrantup.com/faq.html http://vagrantup.com/faq.html * The code - https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant * The original HN submission when Vagrant was launched (286 days ago) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901 And then a quick update for those who want to know whats going on with the project now: The project has been nonstop since January this year, and the codebase is nearing one year old. Vagrant is now on version 0.6.8. Vagrant is used by many companies worldwide and the 0.6.x series is considered stable. In September 2010 I gained sponsorship for my work on Vagrant by Engine Yard[1]. I've been working very hard for the past 2 months to get the project working with other hypervisors (KVM, VMWare), spurring other open source projects of my own in the process (libvirt-rb, virtuoso, you can find these at my github[2]). [1]: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/mitchell-hashimoto-joins-engine-yard-oss-community-grant-program/ http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/mitchell-hashimoto-joins... [2]: http://github.com/mitchellh http://github.com/mitchellh
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  It's nice to see Engine Yard continuing to do things like the OSS Community Grant program. If only every company gave back a little...
- lox 16y ago
  Damn, I must have missed the initial submission. I've been migrating our developer environments over at 99designs to use Vagrant and it's been fantastic. What was previously an unmaintainable shell script is now a re-usable collection of chef recipes and a brief Vagrantfile. Thanks for your hard work!
- tsycho 16y ago
  Looks awesome......great job.
- scottostler 16y ago
  Vagrant is a great tool and I'd love to move my projects over to it. Here's hoping the 64bit Windows incompatibility can be fixed!
  - mitchellh 16y ago
    It can and will be fixed soon. :) Expect an announcement 'soon.'
- Kaya 16y ago
  This project looks great. VirtualBox runs on Solaris, an OS which supports writable snapshots and deduplication in the ZFS filesystem. Is there support for filesystem snapshots in Vagrant? It would be nice to spawn a new virtual machine from an existing on-disk snapshot.
  - mitchellh 16y ago
    I know Vagrant runs on Solaris, but I haven't done anything OS-specific for it, so I'm going to say "no" to this. Hit me up in IRC and we can talk about it.
- anko 16y ago
  VMWare support would be killer! I'm been promoting Vagrant at my place of employment for quite a while but Virtualbox and the lack of commericial support has been the main issue.
  - mitchellh 16y ago
    Working on it. Bad news though: VMWare Fusion (Mac OS X) doesn't expose a full API, so doing so there would be hard. VMWare Workstation on Windows does however, and is a target for the future.
    - anko 16y ago
      the workstation part probably doesn't matter as much as esx/esxi. Ideally I'd like to be able to build a vm in vagrant under virtualbox, and then push it out to a esx/esxi acceptance box, then push it out to a esx/esxi production box. It would mean that the devs could build the images, then get ops to have a look over the config/add their own fixes, then deploy the fixes into production. Not many enterprises I know really want to run virtualbox in production.
- nowarninglabel 16y ago
  Does Vagrant provide any way to create Ubuntu live CDs from a VirtualBox VM instance? If not, happen to know any projects which allow this? There is a rather long winded way to do it I found on the Ubuntu forums, but would pay well for a software tool that could do it.
  - mitchellh 16y ago
    Sorry, I don't know any easy way. I'm good at going the opposite way, but not from VM to CD ;)
- yesno 16y ago
  Hi mitchellh. I haven't used vagrant yet but the tool looks great! It will probably be a superb addition to my day-to-day toolbox (I'm a new VirtualBox user). Thank you for creating the tool. In a probably unrelated question to vagrant, would you happen to know if VirtualBox virtual hdd can be shrinked and expanded? And if VB can, does vagrant support that? Use-case: one 8GB (only use 2GB total) vm instance to be moved from Windows Server to Ubuntu Linux. Or for cloning purposes. Copying 8GB probably would take a lot of time, compacting it to 2GB first then copying it to multiple machines probably would be a lot faster. Thanks again for creating vagrant!
  - mitchellh 16y ago
    VirtualBox does not support resizing disks. You can use other tools (qemu command line comes to mind) to do things like this, but it takes a LONG time and is generally not worth it. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this space. "libguestfs" looks promising for the future, but I haven't evaluated if its useful for your purpose at the moment.
    - anko 16y ago
      According to this: http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2010/12/virtualbox-4-beta-on-solaris.html http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2010/12/virtualbox-4-beta-on-sol... resizing disks is coming in version 4!
kanwisher 16y ago
I've always dreamed of carrying around a netbook to exotic locales and then firing up remote EC2 instances with huge multicpu servers and having a full dev setup for a few hours while in a cafe in the middle of the jungle.
- yesno 16y ago
  you mean in a "cave" in the middle of the jungle right? :D
- mitchellh 16y ago
  I can only say I plan on making this a reality in 2011.
jjoe 16y ago
Why is the Vagrant character missing the front of his footwear exposing his toes? Regards Joe
- benkant 16y ago
  That'd be... because he's a vagrant.
gnubardt 16y ago
I have an Archlinux base box available here: http://gotanysnacks.com/vagrant/ http://gotanysnacks.com/vagrant/ Also, it's well worth the effort to learn Chef (or another automated provisioning tool) if you haven't already. It makes working with Vagrant way easier and saves you time whenever you create a new environment. Plus you can use the same recipes on a production box, so the effort isn't wasted.
Uchikoma 16y ago
Tried it several times on a Windows Box without success. Had troubles trying several Ruby versions, neither version worked.
- mitchellh 16y ago
  Vagrant, for the time being, only works on 32-bit windows. I'm going to take a guess that you didn't get this working because it kept saying "VirtualBox not detected!" and you're on 64-bit. If this is the case, then work is currently underway to fix this. If you're not on 64-bit windows, I'd love to work with you to hear what your experience was and what went wrong. Negative experiences like the one you had are unfortunate, but through them we can fix it and make it better for everyone else. You don't have any contact info in your profile, please contact me at mitchell.hashimoto@gmail.com or through github, irc, etc.
  - Uchikoma 16y ago
    Should be 32bit - will contact you with the error messages - stephan.schmidt@interimcto.de should work otherwise. The problems have been mentioned several times on the internet when I did google, but no solution were mentioned.
mduvall 16y ago
This is neat, I wish there was a screencast or something of the sort up to recap the major points of this application. Does anybody know from experience how flexible it is for recreating an environment close to your own on any *nix based system?
AdamGibbins 16y ago
Would really love a KVM version, simply because you can't run VirtualBox while you have the KVM modules loaded which is annoying as I run multiple KVM VMs. Is there any future chance of libvirt compatibility as an option?

85 points by lox 16y ago

I use vagrant every day, it's really a must-have for a complex stack.

Why hello there! I'm the maintainer/developer behind Vagrant and I'm happy to answer any questions there may be about the project whether it be conceptual or directly related to how Vagrant works. I didn't expect to see this on HN today but I guess I'll just give a giant information dump here for those interested :) Good links for those interested in what Vagrant is: * "Why Vagrant?" - http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/why.html http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/why.html * "Frequently Asked Questions" - http://vagrantup.com/faq.html http://vagrantup.com/faq.html * The code - https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant * The original HN submission when Vagrant was launched (286 days ago) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901 And then a quick update for those who want to know whats going on with the project now: The project has been nonstop since January this year, and the codebase is nearing one year old. Vagrant is now on version 0.6.8. Vagrant is used by many companies worldwide and the 0.6.x series is considered stable. In September 2010 I gained sponsorship for my work on Vagrant by Engine Yard[1]. I've been working very hard for the past 2 months to get the project working with other hypervisors (KVM, VMWare), spurring other open source projects of my own in the process (libvirt-rb, virtuoso, you can find these at my github[2]). [1]: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/mitchell-hashimoto-joins-engine-yard-oss-community-grant-program/ http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/mitchell-hashimoto-joins... [2]: http://github.com/mitchellh http://github.com/mitchellh

steveklabnik 16y ago
It's nice to see Engine Yard continuing to do things like the OSS Community Grant program. If only every company gave back a little...
lox 16y ago
Damn, I must have missed the initial submission. I've been migrating our developer environments over at 99designs to use Vagrant and it's been fantastic. What was previously an unmaintainable shell script is now a re-usable collection of chef recipes and a brief Vagrantfile. Thanks for your hard work!
tsycho 16y ago
Looks awesome......great job.
scottostler 16y ago
Vagrant is a great tool and I'd love to move my projects over to it. Here's hoping the 64bit Windows incompatibility can be fixed!
- mitchellh 16y ago
  It can and will be fixed soon. :) Expect an announcement 'soon.'
Kaya 16y ago
This project looks great. VirtualBox runs on Solaris, an OS which supports writable snapshots and deduplication in the ZFS filesystem. Is there support for filesystem snapshots in Vagrant? It would be nice to spawn a new virtual machine from an existing on-disk snapshot.
- mitchellh 16y ago
  I know Vagrant runs on Solaris, but I haven't done anything OS-specific for it, so I'm going to say "no" to this. Hit me up in IRC and we can talk about it.
anko 16y ago
VMWare support would be killer! I'm been promoting Vagrant at my place of employment for quite a while but Virtualbox and the lack of commericial support has been the main issue.
- mitchellh 16y ago
  Working on it. Bad news though: VMWare Fusion (Mac OS X) doesn't expose a full API, so doing so there would be hard. VMWare Workstation on Windows does however, and is a target for the future.
  - anko 16y ago
    the workstation part probably doesn't matter as much as esx/esxi. Ideally I'd like to be able to build a vm in vagrant under virtualbox, and then push it out to a esx/esxi acceptance box, then push it out to a esx/esxi production box. It would mean that the devs could build the images, then get ops to have a look over the config/add their own fixes, then deploy the fixes into production. Not many enterprises I know really want to run virtualbox in production.
nowarninglabel 16y ago
Does Vagrant provide any way to create Ubuntu live CDs from a VirtualBox VM instance? If not, happen to know any projects which allow this? There is a rather long winded way to do it I found on the Ubuntu forums, but would pay well for a software tool that could do it.
- mitchellh 16y ago
  Sorry, I don't know any easy way. I'm good at going the opposite way, but not from VM to CD ;)
yesno 16y ago
Hi mitchellh. I haven't used vagrant yet but the tool looks great! It will probably be a superb addition to my day-to-day toolbox (I'm a new VirtualBox user). Thank you for creating the tool. In a probably unrelated question to vagrant, would you happen to know if VirtualBox virtual hdd can be shrinked and expanded? And if VB can, does vagrant support that? Use-case: one 8GB (only use 2GB total) vm instance to be moved from Windows Server to Ubuntu Linux. Or for cloning purposes. Copying 8GB probably would take a lot of time, compacting it to 2GB first then copying it to multiple machines probably would be a lot faster. Thanks again for creating vagrant!
- mitchellh 16y ago
  VirtualBox does not support resizing disks. You can use other tools (qemu command line comes to mind) to do things like this, but it takes a LONG time and is generally not worth it. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this space. "libguestfs" looks promising for the future, but I haven't evaluated if its useful for your purpose at the moment.
  - anko 16y ago
    According to this: http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2010/12/virtualbox-4-beta-on-solaris.html http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2010/12/virtualbox-4-beta-on-sol... resizing disks is coming in version 4!

kanwisher 16y ago

I've always dreamed of carrying around a netbook to exotic locales and then firing up remote EC2 instances with huge multicpu servers and having a full dev setup for a few hours while in a cafe in the middle of the jungle.

yesno 16y ago
you mean in a "cave" in the middle of the jungle right? :D
mitchellh 16y ago
I can only say I plan on making this a reality in 2011.

jjoe 16y ago

Why is the Vagrant character missing the front of his footwear exposing his toes? Regards Joe

benkant 16y ago
That'd be... because he's a vagrant.

gnubardt 16y ago

I have an Archlinux base box available here: http://gotanysnacks.com/vagrant/ http://gotanysnacks.com/vagrant/ Also, it's well worth the effort to learn Chef (or another automated provisioning tool) if you haven't already. It makes working with Vagrant way easier and saves you time whenever you create a new environment. Plus you can use the same recipes on a production box, so the effort isn't wasted.

Uchikoma 16y ago

Tried it several times on a Windows Box without success. Had troubles trying several Ruby versions, neither version worked.

mitchellh 16y ago
Vagrant, for the time being, only works on 32-bit windows. I'm going to take a guess that you didn't get this working because it kept saying "VirtualBox not detected!" and you're on 64-bit. If this is the case, then work is currently underway to fix this. If you're not on 64-bit windows, I'd love to work with you to hear what your experience was and what went wrong. Negative experiences like the one you had are unfortunate, but through them we can fix it and make it better for everyone else. You don't have any contact info in your profile, please contact me at mitchell.hashimoto@gmail.com or through github, irc, etc.
- Uchikoma 16y ago
  Should be 32bit - will contact you with the error messages - stephan.schmidt@interimcto.de should work otherwise. The problems have been mentioned several times on the internet when I did google, but no solution were mentioned.

mduvall 16y ago

This is neat, I wish there was a screencast or something of the sort up to recap the major points of this application. Does anybody know from experience how flexible it is for recreating an environment close to your own on any *nix based system?

AdamGibbins 16y ago

Would really love a KVM version, simply because you can't run VirtualBox while you have the KVM modules loaded which is annoying as I run multiple KVM VMs. Is there any future chance of libvirt compatibility as an option?