9 ms·

Vagrant 1.4

169 points by bpierre 13y ago

pezh0re 13y ago
As someone who uses Vagrant for a ton of puppet testing, the part about the Windows guests in 1.5 made me incredibly happy.
yeukhon 13y ago
The machine-readable output is interesting.
WestCoastJustin 13y ago
For anyone who doesn't know. Vagrant acts like a wrapper around VMware, VirtualBox, or even AWS, so that you can easily automate testing. You can also share your Vagrant boxes (images) with others in an easy manner. Vagrant is one of those things, that once you start to use it, you wonder how you managed without it. I have created several screencasts about Vagrant: Learning Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant Create a Vagrant box with Veewee @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-with-veewee http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-wit... Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vagrant http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag... Managing Iptables with Puppet @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/18-managing-iptables-with-puppet http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/18-managing-iptables-with-...
- haberman 13y ago
  Can you explain what Vagrant adds on top of VirtualBox? When I tried it it didn't seem that different than just using VirtualBox directly.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ineedtosleep 13y ago
    Not the parent post, but from my limited use of Vagrant so far, the main difference is that there's a "base" image that you can quickly reset to in order to test the repeat-ability of your deploys. The images also automatically handle VirtualBox's shared folders feature and require little for configuration. Other than that, I agree it's almost like just using VBox directly.
  - mitchellh 13y ago
    The biggest thing it adds on top of VirtualBox is a consistent workflow. If it helps, think of what Vagrant does technically as useless, and think of Vagrant only as a process discipline: to get a dev environment for any project you "vagrant up", to close it out "vagrant destroy", to access it "vagrant ssh", etc. As soon as you get this consistent workflow, then you can teach it to your entire organization and the whole company knows that ANY project in the company can be worked on using this workflow without any dependencies on their own machine. And if ops decides to suddenly change the dev environment from VirtualBox to say... AWS... nothing changes! I've had large companies (200+ developers) switch from VirtualBox to VMware to AWS for their dev environments without their developers ever really noticing. That is pretty cool. Of course, on top of this, you get a lot of nice things: you get provisioners, you get automatic network configuration, you get the entire plugin community, you don't have to worry about stability on your own because you tap the collective stability of thousands of users, etc. But the real power is workflow.
    - emddudley 13y ago
      Is this mostly appropriate for web development? Could it work for embedded or desktop development? Seems like it might be a lot of overhead if you only need to install an IDE and a compiler. Presumably this is also mostly used with Linux. How do people manage Windows licenses with Vagrant?
      - nl 13y ago
        Is this mostly appropriate for web development? Could it work for embedded or desktop development? No, it's very useful for desktop, and especially embedded development. It lets you have consistent images to test your code against. Presumably this is also mostly used with Linux. How do people manage Windows licenses with Vagrant? No, it's very popular on both Windows and OS-X. Virtualbox is most popular on both platforms (because it is free).
        mbreese 13y ago
        > it's very popular on both Windows and OS-X. No, I think that they meant with Windows Guests (hence the license question). I don't think that Vagrant is used much for coding Windows applications, but rather coding Linux (web) applications from Windows hosts. I've never used it, but it looks like there is a way to use this for Windows Guests as well: http://www.thomasvjames.com/2013/09/create-a-windows-base-box-for-vagrant/ http://www.thomasvjames.com/2013/09/create-a-windows-base-bo... YMMV
  - AaronBBrown 13y ago
    I use Vagrant daily. Here's an example I was working on today. I needed to spin up 5 servers, a load balancer and 2 groups of 2 backend servers. I needed to provision them with Chef, have full name resolution, and be able to access the servers from my host machine. Here's my Vagrantfile Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-chef-zero" Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-berkshelf" Vagrant.require_plugin "landrush" last_ip_octet = 10 DOMAIN = "vagrant.dev" Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| config.landrush.enable config.chef_zero.chef_repo_path = "./" config.omnibus.chef_version = '11.8.0' config.vm.box = "opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless" config.vm.box_url = "https://opscode-vm.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless.box" %w{default metrics}.each do |backend| (1..2).each do |i| config.vm.define "be_#{backend}_#{i}".to_sym do |cfg| last_ip_octet += 1 cfg.vm.hostname = "be-#{backend}-#{i}.#{DOMAIN}" cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef| chef.node_name = "be-#{backend}-#{i}" chef.add_role "backend_#{backend}" end end end end config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "/usr/bin/apt-get update --fix-missing" config.vm.define :lb do |cfg| last_ip_octet += 1 lb_ip = "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s cfg.vm.hostname = "lb.#{DOMAIN}" cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => lb_ip cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef| chef.node_name = "lb" chef.add_role "lb" end end end This utilizes a few vagrant plugins, vagrant-chef-zero, vagrant-berkshelf, and landrush which are one liners each to install. After that, I can type vagrant up # build my stack from scratch vagrant destroy # destroy my stack vagrant ssh lb # ssh into the lb instance vagrant provision # execute chef (puppet, ansible, bash, etc) Can you show me equivalent code that fulfills all my requirements using VirtualBox directly and will allow me to change a couple lines to spin this same infrastructure up in AWS or using VMWare?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    What? Automatically installing VirtualBox images, and setting them up with a development environment in 2-3 commands does seem "that different than just using VirtualBox directly"?
    - Wilya 13y ago
      A shell script that can spin up VirtualBox images and run puppet to provision them isn't very difficult to make and would vastly outperform vagrant. Vagrant isn't very good as a piece of software, it's very good as a standard, because it can be used as a standard description of a development environment.
      - AaronBBrown 13y ago
        A shell script that can spin up VirtualBox images and run puppet to provision them isn't very difficult to make Ok. Let's see the code to do that.
- concise_unicorn 13y ago
  Thanks for the screencasts, now I may finally get around to giving it a try.
- xwowsersx 13y ago
  Hey, these are great screencasts, just what I was looking for. Would be awesome to see a screencast that shows how to get an EC2 instance up and running using vagrant.
andyl 13y ago
Docker provisioner - that's great. I could use Ansible to provision Docker containers, but its nice to have a built-in option as well.
tedivm 13y ago
This is fantastic! I just used Vagrant to help automate testing on an email library I wrote (https://github.com/tedivm/Fetch https://github.com/tedivm/Fetch, if anyone is interested- new tests are in the "testing" branch). Vagrant made setting that up really easy. In fact, the hardest part was scripting different responses for whether the machine was already up or not, and the new Machine-Readable Output will make that far, far easier. Thanks for making a great tool better!
peter_l_downs 13y ago
> Work will begin on pulling the Vagrant AWS integration into the core distribution -- to start -- so that you can use Vagrant with AWS (and other providers) right after installing it and without having to juggle plugin versions. This is awesome, I can't wait. I've been waiting for this!
- johnbellone 13y ago
  I am thrilled about this as well. Most of my projects right now have had all of their Vagrant plugin dependencies, including Vagrant itself, in the Gemfile because I wanted to make sure any developer could get a workable development environment without worrying too much about Vagrant versions. On one hand I like the fact that I can install up-to-date plugins this way, but on the other hand I just want it to work out of the box. Although I doubt we'll be able to get away from this. More likely it will cause other frustrations such as needing to override a plugin with a monkey patch, etc.
  - merqumab 13y ago
    I really like how Gradle has solved this problem. You check in the Gradle wrapper (http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.html http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper....) into your source control (it's only 56K), and it automatically fetches Gradle for you if you don't have it. Updating the project's Gradle version is just a matter of changing one or two lines. It's cool to think that the only requirement for anybody to jump into a Gradle project is to have the JDK installed. "git clone <project>", "./gradlew assemble" is all it takes for you to fetch all your dependencies and build the project. I think it'd be interesting to see if Vagrant could incorporate something like this; it sounds like it would help your use case.
    - vorg 13y ago
      > It's cool to think that the only requirement for anybody to jump into a Gradle project is to have the JDK installed. Sounds like a commercial. Many people have good things to say about Gradle's functionality, but too bad about the programming language I have to use with it, i.e. Groovy, at an old 1.x version, with a bloated grammar spec using an old 2.x version of Antlr, i.e. http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/main/org/codehaus/groovy/antlr/groovy.g http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/... Too bad I can't use a language with a simplified easy-to-remember grammar, like Scala, to program Gradle. The latest Gradle release notes http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release-notes http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release-notes always mention both Groovy and Scala when describing how to build projects, but all the build script example code is in that Groovy language. Will Gradle ever expose an API so developers can choose to use the same language for the build scripts as they do for the projects they're building? Perhaps even ship Gradle with different build language options?
NDizzle 13y ago
I'm afraid of upgrading vagrant now like I am afraid of upgrading bootstrap. Too many things break - it's simply not worth the trouble of upgrading and finding all the gotchas scattered all over the place in my config files and code.
- mitchellh 13y ago
  I started the vagrant-spec project to address this. A system like Vagrant is hard to fully unit test because there are a lot of side-effecty things that it does. In many cases, the best way to test it is to run things in a real-life scenario. vagrant-spec includes a acceptance suite that we're going to be building up in order to test more of the features in a black box manner. It is slow to run but if we verify that things are passing before a release, we should be able to catch most daily use cases. Vagrant 1.4 is the first release to run through vagrant-spec and while there are some early bug reports in some fringe areas of Vagrant trickling in, Vagrant seems to be a drop-in upgrade for most users. This shows that it is working, to some extent. And it'll only get better. Of course, if you're nervous about it, it doesn't hurt to wait for a 1.4.1 or so on.
- cleaver 13y ago
  I know what you mean... However, the upgrade process has gotten a lot more reliable lately. At least less problems for me.
FooBarWidget 13y ago
I had hoped that their Docker support would be some magical mechanism that would treat Docker as a kind of VirtualBox. That is, instead of using VirtualBox to create VMs, they would use Docker to create containers. 'vagrant ssh' would then SSH directly into a container instead of the host VM. Sadly, their Docker support is just a provisioner. :( I can do that myself too in a shell script.
- johnbellone 13y ago
  There's not really a way to do that uniformly right now on any system that isn't Linux. I agree that it would be ideal, but the core philosophy behind Vagrant is a single configuration recipe to create portable environments (development). You can do a lot of things in shell scripts, but its still easier to have it all in one place in an easily grokable format.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  It sounds like you want vagrant-lxc.
- TheHippo 13y ago
  If that is what you want, then just install docker on your system ;-)
  - shykes 13y ago
    +1 To use docker on my mac I have replaced Vagrant with boot2docker (http://github.com/steeve/boot2docker http://github.com/steeve/boot2docker). I didn't need all the moving parts anyway - the VM is always the same, the application-specific bits are all defined inside the containers.
    - scottbessler 13y ago
      how do you launch boot2docker on your mac, raw virtualbox? or do you mean you actually dual-boot to it?
kyberias 13y ago
I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works. The home page didn't help me with that AT ALL. It's full of vague terms like "development environment" and "work environment" and buzzwords claiming to "maximize productivity". In your About page, please describe the typical USAGE SCENARIOS of your software and how does it help in those cases exactly.
- mitchellh 13y ago
  This is linked in the 2nd sentence in the getting started section that is linked from one of the two biggest call-to-actions on the homepage: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/ http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/ I'm sorry you couldn't find that!
  - dugmartin 13y ago
    Thanks for yor work Mitchell. I use Vagrant everyday.
  - kyberias 13y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. I still think it would need a concrete example or two. The text is very abstract, long sentences with multiple consecutive adjectives describing how easy it is to use and how powerful it all is. A lot of fluff really. You're trying to sell the idea, not describe how it works. I'm SURE it's a fine tool and I'm just trying to help you communicating it better. :)
- coldtea 13y ago
  >I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works. Well, it's 2013 and you're on HN. If you don't already know what Vagrant is, then perhaps you're not the most qualified information seeker.
  - risratorn 13y ago
    a little harsh ... but actually and unfortunately true :/
stormbrew 13y ago
Probably not the right venue, but I'm a bit disappointed addressing the plugin versioning situation isn't listed as a thing for 1.5. There are plugins for managing plugins but they're really less than ideal. I'd honestly just like to use bundler for it, since it's almost certainly better than anything anyone's likely to make to replace it, but using bundler to run vagrant is currently considered bad for some reason and outputs a frightening warning.
- mitchellh 13y ago
  Bundler doesn't work with Vagrant because Vagrant ships with its own Ruby and RubyGems and all that. So... your Bundler you're executing has a really screwed up state of the world. Its something that certainly needs to be solved, but I think solutions needs more time to mature in my head as well as others.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    The problem right now is that plugins create a screwed up state of the world and their usefulness is rapidly climbing. Installing the vagrant-chef-zero plugin, for example, is a real PITA because the dependency resolution doesn't deal with a json dependency correctly leading to it or chef zero failing to load unless you install them in a very specific order. On the other end of the spectrum, when you're writing a Vagrantfile it's technically almost impossible to know what's going to happen when a user starts it up because of all the hooks plugins can throw in, and you can't tell Vagrant not to load a plugin (which would be an incomplete solution anyways, since I can't know what plugins or plugin versions will have bad interactions). I know you wrote vagrant, so you have a more inside perspective on this, but as a user and occasional plugin writer, it feels like with a gemfile I can specify a state of the world that's considerably less screwed up than the completely random world any given user's install of Vagrant might be.
misnome 13y ago
I like vagrant, but would love it to work with VMWare fusion, but cannot justify paying more than the cost of fusion for a vagrant plugin. Anyone aware of an open source alternative to the official VMWare provisioner?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- i386 13y ago
  Why is using Virtual Box not an option if you are price sensitive?
  - aks314 13y ago
    VirtualBox is getting better, but it's still no match for vmware's performance(especially file share).
    - mrinterweb 13y ago
      I last time I used vagrant was 1.2 on whatever the latest virtualbox at the time was. The performance was about half as good as the host machine. The host machine was running the desktop version of Ubuntu at the time. I was not able to easily identify if VirtualBox's performance problems were CPU or IO bound. If I hear that the performance is close to native, I'll give it another try. Otherwise, I can't see the point.
      - manojlds 13y ago
        If you are on Linux, why not use vagrant with lxc containers?
        mrinterweb 13y ago
        When I was using vagrant 1.2, lxc containers were not fully functional so I didn't bother trying with lxc. I'll gladly give it another try to see if performance is significantly better than virtalbox. Thanks for the tip by the way.
joemaller1 13y ago
Congratulations to mitchellh and the Vagrant team. Vagrant is a fantastic tool for streamlining workflows, but also an amazing educational opportunity. Disposable Linux servers: Play, experiment, destroy, try again. Thank you for this, I can't believe how much I've learned.
eyepulp 13y ago
We're using vagrant and ansible to manage local dev instances with the same ansible scripts responsible for provisioning/deployment to our production boxes. My thought being the less I manage with vagrant, and the more I codify stuff in ansible, the more predictable things are when I go to provision/deploy in production. I'm thrilled with how vagrant helps the process locally, but at the same time want to do as little as possible in vagrant because it's not applicable/involved when I provision/manage a box @ Linode or Digital Ocean. Am I under-utilizing vagrant? Or missing a greater benefit by limiting its role?
mradmin 13y ago
So you can now enforce vagrant versions in your Vagrantfile, which is great, but this is a new feature thus older versions of vagrant won't honour it...so this feature is useless for me, at least for a while. I will continue to do this: https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/7803472 https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/7803472
poseid 13y ago
Anyone can give a short summary on what Docker adds/does different from server automation, e.g. Chef provisioner?
peteridah 13y ago
Vagrant is an awesome tool for CI. I have used it extensively with Jenkins to provision environments, AWS deployments and Digital Ocean Servers. Recently I have used vagrant to easily manage OSX 10.8 guests on vmware-fusion, as the demand to provision environments for ios-related development is on the increase. I am not aware of any other tool that makes this easier. Vagrant RAWKS!
fsargent 13y ago
Vagrant 1.4 is now available by Brew Cask https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/pull/2027 https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/pull/2027 $ brew update $ brew cask install vagrant

169 points by bpierre 13y ago

As someone who uses Vagrant for a ton of puppet testing, the part about the Windows guests in 1.5 made me incredibly happy.

yeukhon 13y ago

The machine-readable output is interesting.

WestCoastJustin 13y ago

For anyone who doesn't know. Vagrant acts like a wrapper around VMware, VirtualBox, or even AWS, so that you can easily automate testing. You can also share your Vagrant boxes (images) with others in an easy manner. Vagrant is one of those things, that once you start to use it, you wonder how you managed without it. I have created several screencasts about Vagrant: Learning Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant Create a Vagrant box with Veewee @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-with-veewee http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-wit... Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vagrant http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag... Managing Iptables with Puppet @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/18-managing-iptables-with-puppet http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/18-managing-iptables-with-...

haberman 13y ago
Can you explain what Vagrant adds on top of VirtualBox? When I tried it it didn't seem that different than just using VirtualBox directly.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ineedtosleep 13y ago
  Not the parent post, but from my limited use of Vagrant so far, the main difference is that there's a "base" image that you can quickly reset to in order to test the repeat-ability of your deploys. The images also automatically handle VirtualBox's shared folders feature and require little for configuration. Other than that, I agree it's almost like just using VBox directly.
- mitchellh 13y ago
  The biggest thing it adds on top of VirtualBox is a consistent workflow. If it helps, think of what Vagrant does technically as useless, and think of Vagrant only as a process discipline: to get a dev environment for any project you "vagrant up", to close it out "vagrant destroy", to access it "vagrant ssh", etc. As soon as you get this consistent workflow, then you can teach it to your entire organization and the whole company knows that ANY project in the company can be worked on using this workflow without any dependencies on their own machine. And if ops decides to suddenly change the dev environment from VirtualBox to say... AWS... nothing changes! I've had large companies (200+ developers) switch from VirtualBox to VMware to AWS for their dev environments without their developers ever really noticing. That is pretty cool. Of course, on top of this, you get a lot of nice things: you get provisioners, you get automatic network configuration, you get the entire plugin community, you don't have to worry about stability on your own because you tap the collective stability of thousands of users, etc. But the real power is workflow.
  - emddudley 13y ago
    Is this mostly appropriate for web development? Could it work for embedded or desktop development? Seems like it might be a lot of overhead if you only need to install an IDE and a compiler. Presumably this is also mostly used with Linux. How do people manage Windows licenses with Vagrant?
    - nl 13y ago
      Is this mostly appropriate for web development? Could it work for embedded or desktop development? No, it's very useful for desktop, and especially embedded development. It lets you have consistent images to test your code against. Presumably this is also mostly used with Linux. How do people manage Windows licenses with Vagrant? No, it's very popular on both Windows and OS-X. Virtualbox is most popular on both platforms (because it is free).
      - mbreese 13y ago
        > it's very popular on both Windows and OS-X. No, I think that they meant with Windows Guests (hence the license question). I don't think that Vagrant is used much for coding Windows applications, but rather coding Linux (web) applications from Windows hosts. I've never used it, but it looks like there is a way to use this for Windows Guests as well: http://www.thomasvjames.com/2013/09/create-a-windows-base-box-for-vagrant/ http://www.thomasvjames.com/2013/09/create-a-windows-base-bo... YMMV
- AaronBBrown 13y ago
  I use Vagrant daily. Here's an example I was working on today. I needed to spin up 5 servers, a load balancer and 2 groups of 2 backend servers. I needed to provision them with Chef, have full name resolution, and be able to access the servers from my host machine. Here's my Vagrantfile Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-chef-zero" Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-berkshelf" Vagrant.require_plugin "landrush" last_ip_octet = 10 DOMAIN = "vagrant.dev" Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| config.landrush.enable config.chef_zero.chef_repo_path = "./" config.omnibus.chef_version = '11.8.0' config.vm.box = "opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless" config.vm.box_url = "https://opscode-vm.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless.box" %w{default metrics}.each do |backend| (1..2).each do |i| config.vm.define "be_#{backend}_#{i}".to_sym do |cfg| last_ip_octet += 1 cfg.vm.hostname = "be-#{backend}-#{i}.#{DOMAIN}" cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef| chef.node_name = "be-#{backend}-#{i}" chef.add_role "backend_#{backend}" end end end end config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "/usr/bin/apt-get update --fix-missing" config.vm.define :lb do |cfg| last_ip_octet += 1 lb_ip = "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s cfg.vm.hostname = "lb.#{DOMAIN}" cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => lb_ip cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef| chef.node_name = "lb" chef.add_role "lb" end end end This utilizes a few vagrant plugins, vagrant-chef-zero, vagrant-berkshelf, and landrush which are one liners each to install. After that, I can type vagrant up # build my stack from scratch vagrant destroy # destroy my stack vagrant ssh lb # ssh into the lb instance vagrant provision # execute chef (puppet, ansible, bash, etc) Can you show me equivalent code that fulfills all my requirements using VirtualBox directly and will allow me to change a couple lines to spin this same infrastructure up in AWS or using VMWare?
- coldtea 13y ago
  What? Automatically installing VirtualBox images, and setting them up with a development environment in 2-3 commands does seem "that different than just using VirtualBox directly"?
  - Wilya 13y ago
    A shell script that can spin up VirtualBox images and run puppet to provision them isn't very difficult to make and would vastly outperform vagrant. Vagrant isn't very good as a piece of software, it's very good as a standard, because it can be used as a standard description of a development environment.
    - AaronBBrown 13y ago
      A shell script that can spin up VirtualBox images and run puppet to provision them isn't very difficult to make Ok. Let's see the code to do that.
concise_unicorn 13y ago
Thanks for the screencasts, now I may finally get around to giving it a try.
xwowsersx 13y ago
Hey, these are great screencasts, just what I was looking for. Would be awesome to see a screencast that shows how to get an EC2 instance up and running using vagrant.

andyl 13y ago

Docker provisioner - that's great. I could use Ansible to provision Docker containers, but its nice to have a built-in option as well.

tedivm 13y ago

This is fantastic! I just used Vagrant to help automate testing on an email library I wrote (https://github.com/tedivm/Fetch https://github.com/tedivm/Fetch, if anyone is interested- new tests are in the "testing" branch). Vagrant made setting that up really easy. In fact, the hardest part was scripting different responses for whether the machine was already up or not, and the new Machine-Readable Output will make that far, far easier. Thanks for making a great tool better!

peter_l_downs 13y ago

> Work will begin on pulling the Vagrant AWS integration into the core distribution -- to start -- so that you can use Vagrant with AWS (and other providers) right after installing it and without having to juggle plugin versions. This is awesome, I can't wait. I've been waiting for this!

johnbellone 13y ago
I am thrilled about this as well. Most of my projects right now have had all of their Vagrant plugin dependencies, including Vagrant itself, in the Gemfile because I wanted to make sure any developer could get a workable development environment without worrying too much about Vagrant versions. On one hand I like the fact that I can install up-to-date plugins this way, but on the other hand I just want it to work out of the box. Although I doubt we'll be able to get away from this. More likely it will cause other frustrations such as needing to override a plugin with a monkey patch, etc.
- merqumab 13y ago
  I really like how Gradle has solved this problem. You check in the Gradle wrapper (http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.html http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper....) into your source control (it's only 56K), and it automatically fetches Gradle for you if you don't have it. Updating the project's Gradle version is just a matter of changing one or two lines. It's cool to think that the only requirement for anybody to jump into a Gradle project is to have the JDK installed. "git clone <project>", "./gradlew assemble" is all it takes for you to fetch all your dependencies and build the project. I think it'd be interesting to see if Vagrant could incorporate something like this; it sounds like it would help your use case.
  - vorg 13y ago
    > It's cool to think that the only requirement for anybody to jump into a Gradle project is to have the JDK installed. Sounds like a commercial. Many people have good things to say about Gradle's functionality, but too bad about the programming language I have to use with it, i.e. Groovy, at an old 1.x version, with a bloated grammar spec using an old 2.x version of Antlr, i.e. http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/main/org/codehaus/groovy/antlr/groovy.g http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/... Too bad I can't use a language with a simplified easy-to-remember grammar, like Scala, to program Gradle. The latest Gradle release notes http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release-notes http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release-notes always mention both Groovy and Scala when describing how to build projects, but all the build script example code is in that Groovy language. Will Gradle ever expose an API so developers can choose to use the same language for the build scripts as they do for the projects they're building? Perhaps even ship Gradle with different build language options?

NDizzle 13y ago

I'm afraid of upgrading vagrant now like I am afraid of upgrading bootstrap. Too many things break - it's simply not worth the trouble of upgrading and finding all the gotchas scattered all over the place in my config files and code.

mitchellh 13y ago
I started the vagrant-spec project to address this. A system like Vagrant is hard to fully unit test because there are a lot of side-effecty things that it does. In many cases, the best way to test it is to run things in a real-life scenario. vagrant-spec includes a acceptance suite that we're going to be building up in order to test more of the features in a black box manner. It is slow to run but if we verify that things are passing before a release, we should be able to catch most daily use cases. Vagrant 1.4 is the first release to run through vagrant-spec and while there are some early bug reports in some fringe areas of Vagrant trickling in, Vagrant seems to be a drop-in upgrade for most users. This shows that it is working, to some extent. And it'll only get better. Of course, if you're nervous about it, it doesn't hurt to wait for a 1.4.1 or so on.
cleaver 13y ago
I know what you mean... However, the upgrade process has gotten a lot more reliable lately. At least less problems for me.

FooBarWidget 13y ago

I had hoped that their Docker support would be some magical mechanism that would treat Docker as a kind of VirtualBox. That is, instead of using VirtualBox to create VMs, they would use Docker to create containers. 'vagrant ssh' would then SSH directly into a container instead of the host VM. Sadly, their Docker support is just a provisioner. :( I can do that myself too in a shell script.

johnbellone 13y ago
There's not really a way to do that uniformly right now on any system that isn't Linux. I agree that it would be ideal, but the core philosophy behind Vagrant is a single configuration recipe to create portable environments (development). You can do a lot of things in shell scripts, but its still easier to have it all in one place in an easily grokable format.
bryanlarsen 13y ago
It sounds like you want vagrant-lxc.
TheHippo 13y ago
If that is what you want, then just install docker on your system ;-)
- shykes 13y ago
  +1 To use docker on my mac I have replaced Vagrant with boot2docker (http://github.com/steeve/boot2docker http://github.com/steeve/boot2docker). I didn't need all the moving parts anyway - the VM is always the same, the application-specific bits are all defined inside the containers.
  - scottbessler 13y ago
    how do you launch boot2docker on your mac, raw virtualbox? or do you mean you actually dual-boot to it?

kyberias 13y ago

I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works. The home page didn't help me with that AT ALL. It's full of vague terms like "development environment" and "work environment" and buzzwords claiming to "maximize productivity". In your About page, please describe the typical USAGE SCENARIOS of your software and how does it help in those cases exactly.

mitchellh 13y ago
This is linked in the 2nd sentence in the getting started section that is linked from one of the two biggest call-to-actions on the homepage: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/ http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/ I'm sorry you couldn't find that!
- dugmartin 13y ago
  Thanks for yor work Mitchell. I use Vagrant everyday.
- kyberias 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. I still think it would need a concrete example or two. The text is very abstract, long sentences with multiple consecutive adjectives describing how easy it is to use and how powerful it all is. A lot of fluff really. You're trying to sell the idea, not describe how it works. I'm SURE it's a fine tool and I'm just trying to help you communicating it better. :)
coldtea 13y ago
>I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works. Well, it's 2013 and you're on HN. If you don't already know what Vagrant is, then perhaps you're not the most qualified information seeker.
- risratorn 13y ago
  a little harsh ... but actually and unfortunately true :/

stormbrew 13y ago

Probably not the right venue, but I'm a bit disappointed addressing the plugin versioning situation isn't listed as a thing for 1.5. There are plugins for managing plugins but they're really less than ideal. I'd honestly just like to use bundler for it, since it's almost certainly better than anything anyone's likely to make to replace it, but using bundler to run vagrant is currently considered bad for some reason and outputs a frightening warning.

mitchellh 13y ago
Bundler doesn't work with Vagrant because Vagrant ships with its own Ruby and RubyGems and all that. So... your Bundler you're executing has a really screwed up state of the world. Its something that certainly needs to be solved, but I think solutions needs more time to mature in my head as well as others.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  The problem right now is that plugins create a screwed up state of the world and their usefulness is rapidly climbing. Installing the vagrant-chef-zero plugin, for example, is a real PITA because the dependency resolution doesn't deal with a json dependency correctly leading to it or chef zero failing to load unless you install them in a very specific order. On the other end of the spectrum, when you're writing a Vagrantfile it's technically almost impossible to know what's going to happen when a user starts it up because of all the hooks plugins can throw in, and you can't tell Vagrant not to load a plugin (which would be an incomplete solution anyways, since I can't know what plugins or plugin versions will have bad interactions). I know you wrote vagrant, so you have a more inside perspective on this, but as a user and occasional plugin writer, it feels like with a gemfile I can specify a state of the world that's considerably less screwed up than the completely random world any given user's install of Vagrant might be.

misnome 13y ago

I like vagrant, but would love it to work with VMWare fusion, but cannot justify paying more than the cost of fusion for a vagrant plugin. Anyone aware of an open source alternative to the official VMWare provisioner?

deleted 13y ago
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i386 13y ago
Why is using Virtual Box not an option if you are price sensitive?
- aks314 13y ago
  VirtualBox is getting better, but it's still no match for vmware's performance(especially file share).
  - mrinterweb 13y ago
    I last time I used vagrant was 1.2 on whatever the latest virtualbox at the time was. The performance was about half as good as the host machine. The host machine was running the desktop version of Ubuntu at the time. I was not able to easily identify if VirtualBox's performance problems were CPU or IO bound. If I hear that the performance is close to native, I'll give it another try. Otherwise, I can't see the point.
    - manojlds 13y ago
      If you are on Linux, why not use vagrant with lxc containers?
      - mrinterweb 13y ago
        When I was using vagrant 1.2, lxc containers were not fully functional so I didn't bother trying with lxc. I'll gladly give it another try to see if performance is significantly better than virtalbox. Thanks for the tip by the way.

joemaller1 13y ago

Congratulations to mitchellh and the Vagrant team. Vagrant is a fantastic tool for streamlining workflows, but also an amazing educational opportunity. Disposable Linux servers: Play, experiment, destroy, try again. Thank you for this, I can't believe how much I've learned.

eyepulp 13y ago

We're using vagrant and ansible to manage local dev instances with the same ansible scripts responsible for provisioning/deployment to our production boxes. My thought being the less I manage with vagrant, and the more I codify stuff in ansible, the more predictable things are when I go to provision/deploy in production. I'm thrilled with how vagrant helps the process locally, but at the same time want to do as little as possible in vagrant because it's not applicable/involved when I provision/manage a box @ Linode or Digital Ocean. Am I under-utilizing vagrant? Or missing a greater benefit by limiting its role?

mradmin 13y ago

So you can now enforce vagrant versions in your Vagrantfile, which is great, but this is a new feature thus older versions of vagrant won't honour it...so this feature is useless for me, at least for a while. I will continue to do this: https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/7803472 https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/7803472

poseid 13y ago

Anyone can give a short summary on what Docker adds/does different from server automation, e.g. Chef provisioner?

peteridah 13y ago

Vagrant is an awesome tool for CI. I have used it extensively with Jenkins to provision environments, AWS deployments and Digital Ocean Servers. Recently I have used vagrant to easily manage OSX 10.8 guests on vmware-fusion, as the demand to provision environments for ios-related development is on the increase. I am not aware of any other tool that makes this easier. Vagrant RAWKS!

fsargent 13y ago

Vagrant 1.4 is now available by Brew Cask https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/pull/2027 https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/pull/2027 $ brew update $ brew cask install vagrant