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Creator of Vagrant here. Pleasantly surprised to see Vagrant on top of HN! Vagrant has matured a lot in the past year (since it has been on HN) both in the core

Creator of Vagrant here. Pleasantly surprised to see Vagrant on top of HN! Vagrant has matured a lot in the past year (since it has been on HN) both in the core but also in the community. There are now tons of plugins available, there is an O'Reilly book out, and much more. Most importantly, I think, is that the project has added 3 more core committers in the past few months. And Vagrant 1.4 is also under heavy development with tons of great new features and bug fixes upcoming. See my Twitter stream for more info. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. And thanks for the support!

askedrelic 13y ago
Should I upgrade to VirtualBox 4.3 yet or stick with 4.2? I remember you cautioning about new things not being as stable in 4.3.
- mitchellh 13y ago
  The only issues I hear about 4.3 are people who have _upgraded_ (not fresh installed) to Mavericks on OS X. Personally, a fresh install of 4.3 on Mavericks and I have no issue. YMMV, however.
  - vinu76jsr 13y ago
    Mavericks and VB 4.3(4.3.2) doesn't really go hand in hand together, I wasted several hour the day before on trying to configure it properly to no avail, downgraded to 4.2 later on. It's better to stick with 4.2 if you are on mavericks.
  - garrettdreyfus 13y ago
    I also have no problems with a fresh install of Mavericks and VB 4.3
- sdnguyen90 13y ago
  I was also unsuccessful in getting 4.3 to work on Mavericks. Ended up reinstalling 4.2 and everything worked fine
SkyMarshal 13y ago
Any support coming for Salt, Ansible, and/or Docker?
- hunvreus 13y ago
  Not sure what you mean by support, but you should be able to use all of them together for different things; - http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible.html http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible.html - http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/vagrant/ http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/vagrant/ - http://devo.ps/blog/2013/09/25/vagrant-docker-and-ansible-wtf.html http://devo.ps/blog/2013/09/25/vagrant-docker-and-ansible-wt...
- chewxy 13y ago
  Salty Vagrant is good, apart from the silly name - I use it: https://github.com/saltstack/salty-vagrant https://github.com/saltstack/salty-vagrant
- mitchellh 13y ago
  Salt is supported already in Vagrant (since 1.2 or 1.3). Ansible as well! A docker provisioner is actually making its way into core for 1.4. If you want to know what that looks like take a look at "Vocker" (the plugin).
  - SkyMarshal 13y ago
    Thanks! The front page only mentions Chef and Puppet, so fwiw this isn't clear at a glance.
- HeyImAlex 13y ago
  Though it's worth mentioning that Ansible is supported as a provisioner out of the box now, you can actually use vagrant with any configuration management system you can imagine; just set the target ip to 127.0.0.1, ssh port to 2222, user to vagrant, and ssh key file to ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key. (Thats for boxes set up with the default configuration, obviously it would be a little different if you were running a more complex system.)
jmathai 13y ago
I guess I'm surprised not everyone is already using Vagrant. Thanks for such an awesome piece of software.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- stollercyrus 13y ago
  For me the biggest barrier to adopting Vagrant was getting my rails stack setup in an easily reproducible way. It took me a while to get my laptop environment setup the way I like, so I was hesitant to have to start that process again. Some of my friends had the same problem, so I put together some scripts to automate Vagrant + Rails: https://github.com/cyrusstoller/gardenbed https://github.com/cyrusstoller/gardenbed
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    Well, Vagrant is a utility that wraps popular virtual managers such as virtualbox and vmware under a single user interface (the vagrant command line) and provide configurations to setup a VM along with user-defined boostrap scripts (puppet, chef, ansible, salt, bash script, etc). Based on the way you describe you situation, I think the barrier is in configuration management. That is, writing a puppet or an ansible script is still very time consuming. A vagrant machine in general is nothing more than a vanilla server after a full install. For me, I am beginning to investigate the possibility to create a system package (e.g. debian package) for all the apps I need to run. I think FPM will help.
    - stollercyrus 13y ago
      Right. I'd like to help people jumpstart this time consuming process. I'm interested to see your approach as well.
      - yeukhon 13y ago
        Yeah. AWS marketplace is excellent. Imagine Vagrant has a bunch of modules available. :) People are already sharing their, for example, wordpress installation, on github. But I am more interested in modules.
xmonkee 13y ago
Is there any way to automatically generate a provisioning script based on what was installed on the guest machine? For example, I do "vagrant ssh" and then install my whole development environment and it creates a script to do it every time based on what changed?
- mitchellh 13y ago
  Not within Vagrant itself. This is really the realm of configuration management tools. As far as I know, no tools do this reverse engineering because it is a fundamentally very difficult problem, but many of the config mgmt tools make it very easy to translate shell commands to rudimentary scripts for their systems.
  - jsmeaton 13y ago
    Vagrant doesn't, but blueprint[0] seems to be a decent tool for generating puppet manifests. I haven't used it personally, but an Ops guy at work has had some success with it. [0]http://devstructure.com/blueprint/ http://devstructure.com/blueprint/
  - mryan 13y ago
    Puppet has some limited support for generating manifests based on the state of an existing system: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/resource.html http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/resource.html
- candeira 13y ago
  Look at blueprint: https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint/ https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint/ Right now it has frontends for bcfg2, cfengine, chef, puppet and shell scripts. It's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of giving you a base set of provisioning rules you can then refine by hand.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
codelust 13y ago
Hey Mitchell, Thank you for producing such an awesome piece of software. I have been doing my local development on a Vagrant box for about a year now and in that time I have been able to move from OS X to Linux almost seamlessly thanks to Vagrant. The only problem I have with it is the slowness of the default shared folders mechanism. Guess I need to bite the bullet one of these days switch to NFS.
- amccloud 13y ago
  NFS is no silver bullet. In exchange for performance and reliability you lose some production/development parity. You need to special case your provisioning script to guard against any FS permission changes.
  - codelust 13y ago
    That's the reason why I gave it up the last time I tried it. IIRC, there's a requirement to run 'vagrant up' with sudo and that does things which I don't like. Maybe, I'll try something like leaving the files on the guest and mount it on the host using SSHFS. My write performance will take a hit when I am editing files, but, if I can get rid of the sluggishness it will be worth it.
- steveax 13y ago
  Are you using Virtualbox VMs, or VMware VMs? My seat-of-the-pants experience is that VMware shares are more performant.
  - codelust 13y ago
    Virtualbox VMs. Never tried the VMware ones. The performance is acceptable most of the times, other than when I am running one of those PHP frameworks that includes a million files to process each request.
- loevborg 13y ago
  I'm seeing the same problem, running the phpunit tests from a PHP framework inside a Vagrant box (Ubuntu 12.04 as host and guest, VirtualBox provider, current vagrant). The tests run >3 times slower than on the physical machine. I have no idea what is causing the sluggishness.
emocakes 13y ago
how about you fix the issue with the vmware workstation provider -> https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/2239 https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/2239
foobarqux 13y ago
How do you ensure security of Vagrant images?
bobx11 13y ago
I asked for a refund of the VMWare plugin the same day I purchased it, over a week ago and have received no response. It doesn't work reliably compared to the virtualbox one and requires windowsesque multiple restarts to make it work at all.
- mitchellh 13y ago
  I'm sorry about that. I just completed this for you. :)
- modernerd 13y ago
  A counterpoint for anyone reading this who is considering the paid VMWare plugin: it works flawlessly for me. On my MacBook Pro with Mavericks, it uses less CPU than my VirtualBox Vagrant boxes and feels snappier overall (boxes start and stop faster, Apache/nginx feel quicker, shared file updates are fast). It was definitely worth the money for me – not having to deal with flaky Mavericks support in VirtualBox alone is worth the price. For anyone building their own VMWare boxes with Packer and Fusion, note that there's a known issue with shared folders in the current version of VMWare Tools (6.0.2). The workaround is to download Fusion Tools version 6.0.1 and install that instead, as mentioned here: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/462543 https://communities.vmware.com/thread/462543 Here's a shell script to automate that under Ubuntu if you need to: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c641a4b0c4ef7b45f07e https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c641a4b0c4ef7b45f07e

askedrelic 13y ago

Should I upgrade to VirtualBox 4.3 yet or stick with 4.2? I remember you cautioning about new things not being as stable in 4.3.

mitchellh 13y ago
The only issues I hear about 4.3 are people who have _upgraded_ (not fresh installed) to Mavericks on OS X. Personally, a fresh install of 4.3 on Mavericks and I have no issue. YMMV, however.
- vinu76jsr 13y ago
  Mavericks and VB 4.3(4.3.2) doesn't really go hand in hand together, I wasted several hour the day before on trying to configure it properly to no avail, downgraded to 4.2 later on. It's better to stick with 4.2 if you are on mavericks.
- garrettdreyfus 13y ago
  I also have no problems with a fresh install of Mavericks and VB 4.3
sdnguyen90 13y ago
I was also unsuccessful in getting 4.3 to work on Mavericks. Ended up reinstalling 4.2 and everything worked fine

SkyMarshal 13y ago

Any support coming for Salt, Ansible, and/or Docker?

hunvreus 13y ago
Not sure what you mean by support, but you should be able to use all of them together for different things; - http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible.html http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible.html - http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/vagrant/ http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/vagrant/ - http://devo.ps/blog/2013/09/25/vagrant-docker-and-ansible-wtf.html http://devo.ps/blog/2013/09/25/vagrant-docker-and-ansible-wt...
chewxy 13y ago
Salty Vagrant is good, apart from the silly name - I use it: https://github.com/saltstack/salty-vagrant https://github.com/saltstack/salty-vagrant
mitchellh 13y ago
Salt is supported already in Vagrant (since 1.2 or 1.3). Ansible as well! A docker provisioner is actually making its way into core for 1.4. If you want to know what that looks like take a look at "Vocker" (the plugin).
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  Thanks! The front page only mentions Chef and Puppet, so fwiw this isn't clear at a glance.
HeyImAlex 13y ago
Though it's worth mentioning that Ansible is supported as a provisioner out of the box now, you can actually use vagrant with any configuration management system you can imagine; just set the target ip to 127.0.0.1, ssh port to 2222, user to vagrant, and ssh key file to ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key. (Thats for boxes set up with the default configuration, obviously it would be a little different if you were running a more complex system.)

jmathai 13y ago

I guess I'm surprised not everyone is already using Vagrant. Thanks for such an awesome piece of software.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
stollercyrus 13y ago
For me the biggest barrier to adopting Vagrant was getting my rails stack setup in an easily reproducible way. It took me a while to get my laptop environment setup the way I like, so I was hesitant to have to start that process again. Some of my friends had the same problem, so I put together some scripts to automate Vagrant + Rails: https://github.com/cyrusstoller/gardenbed https://github.com/cyrusstoller/gardenbed
- yeukhon 13y ago
  Well, Vagrant is a utility that wraps popular virtual managers such as virtualbox and vmware under a single user interface (the vagrant command line) and provide configurations to setup a VM along with user-defined boostrap scripts (puppet, chef, ansible, salt, bash script, etc). Based on the way you describe you situation, I think the barrier is in configuration management. That is, writing a puppet or an ansible script is still very time consuming. A vagrant machine in general is nothing more than a vanilla server after a full install. For me, I am beginning to investigate the possibility to create a system package (e.g. debian package) for all the apps I need to run. I think FPM will help.
  - stollercyrus 13y ago
    Right. I'd like to help people jumpstart this time consuming process. I'm interested to see your approach as well.
    - yeukhon 13y ago
      Yeah. AWS marketplace is excellent. Imagine Vagrant has a bunch of modules available. :) People are already sharing their, for example, wordpress installation, on github. But I am more interested in modules.

xmonkee 13y ago

Is there any way to automatically generate a provisioning script based on what was installed on the guest machine? For example, I do "vagrant ssh" and then install my whole development environment and it creates a script to do it every time based on what changed?

mitchellh 13y ago
Not within Vagrant itself. This is really the realm of configuration management tools. As far as I know, no tools do this reverse engineering because it is a fundamentally very difficult problem, but many of the config mgmt tools make it very easy to translate shell commands to rudimentary scripts for their systems.
- jsmeaton 13y ago
  Vagrant doesn't, but blueprint[0] seems to be a decent tool for generating puppet manifests. I haven't used it personally, but an Ops guy at work has had some success with it. [0]http://devstructure.com/blueprint/ http://devstructure.com/blueprint/
- mryan 13y ago
  Puppet has some limited support for generating manifests based on the state of an existing system: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/resource.html http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/resource.html
candeira 13y ago
Look at blueprint: https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint/ https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint/ Right now it has frontends for bcfg2, cfengine, chef, puppet and shell scripts. It's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of giving you a base set of provisioning rules you can then refine by hand.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

codelust 13y ago

Hey Mitchell, Thank you for producing such an awesome piece of software. I have been doing my local development on a Vagrant box for about a year now and in that time I have been able to move from OS X to Linux almost seamlessly thanks to Vagrant. The only problem I have with it is the slowness of the default shared folders mechanism. Guess I need to bite the bullet one of these days switch to NFS.

amccloud 13y ago
NFS is no silver bullet. In exchange for performance and reliability you lose some production/development parity. You need to special case your provisioning script to guard against any FS permission changes.
- codelust 13y ago
  That's the reason why I gave it up the last time I tried it. IIRC, there's a requirement to run 'vagrant up' with sudo and that does things which I don't like. Maybe, I'll try something like leaving the files on the guest and mount it on the host using SSHFS. My write performance will take a hit when I am editing files, but, if I can get rid of the sluggishness it will be worth it.
steveax 13y ago
Are you using Virtualbox VMs, or VMware VMs? My seat-of-the-pants experience is that VMware shares are more performant.
- codelust 13y ago
  Virtualbox VMs. Never tried the VMware ones. The performance is acceptable most of the times, other than when I am running one of those PHP frameworks that includes a million files to process each request.
loevborg 13y ago
I'm seeing the same problem, running the phpunit tests from a PHP framework inside a Vagrant box (Ubuntu 12.04 as host and guest, VirtualBox provider, current vagrant). The tests run >3 times slower than on the physical machine. I have no idea what is causing the sluggishness.

emocakes 13y ago

how about you fix the issue with the vmware workstation provider -> https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/2239 https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/2239

foobarqux 13y ago

How do you ensure security of Vagrant images?

bobx11 13y ago

I asked for a refund of the VMWare plugin the same day I purchased it, over a week ago and have received no response. It doesn't work reliably compared to the virtualbox one and requires windowsesque multiple restarts to make it work at all.

mitchellh 13y ago
I'm sorry about that. I just completed this for you. :)
modernerd 13y ago
A counterpoint for anyone reading this who is considering the paid VMWare plugin: it works flawlessly for me. On my MacBook Pro with Mavericks, it uses less CPU than my VirtualBox Vagrant boxes and feels snappier overall (boxes start and stop faster, Apache/nginx feel quicker, shared file updates are fast). It was definitely worth the money for me – not having to deal with flaky Mavericks support in VirtualBox alone is worth the price. For anyone building their own VMWare boxes with Packer and Fusion, note that there's a known issue with shared folders in the current version of VMWare Tools (6.0.2). The workaround is to download Fusion Tools version 6.0.1 and install that instead, as mentioned here: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/462543 https://communities.vmware.com/thread/462543 Here's a shell script to automate that under Ubuntu if you need to: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c641a4b0c4ef7b45f07e https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c641a4b0c4ef7b45f07e