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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 you

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
    - suraj 13y ago
      I am using Vagrant to develop a buildroot based embedded project. I had to use NFS for sharing because of hardlinks generated for buildroot. Other than that everything went smoothly. With vagrant primary mode of interaction is through ssh (although it supports showing GUI on vagrant up). So I don't think it is a good fit for developing Windows or desktop applications.
- 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.

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
  - suraj 13y ago
    I am using Vagrant to develop a buildroot based embedded project. I had to use NFS for sharing because of hardlinks generated for buildroot. Other than that everything went smoothly. With vagrant primary mode of interaction is through ssh (although it supports showing GUI on vagrant up). So I don't think it is a good fit for developing Windows or desktop applications.
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.