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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 on
by 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 agoIs 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 agoIs 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 agoI 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.