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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 di

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!

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!