This
article is a beginner guide explain What is Vagrant, why to use and what It
really mean for you.
Before
that Just understand
What is Vagrant?
Vagrant
is one of the popular tools for building and managing virtual machine (VM)
environments. It has an easy-to-use workflow and focuses on automation.
With the help of Vagrant, we can reduce development environment setup time, increases
production parity, and makes the "works on my machine" excuse a relic
of the past.
Vagrant is suitable for any type of development environment.
Why to use Vagrant?
Vagrant
provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments It is
built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single
consistent workflow to help maximize the productivity and flexibility of you
and your team.
To
achieve this, Vagrant stands on the shoulders of giants. Machines are
provisioned on top of VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, or any other service provider.
Then,
industry-standard provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet,
can automatically install and configure software on the virtual machine.
To
understand the importance of Vagrant let’s take an example where we need the app, DB and Web Server for Some testing purposes.
If we try
to set up a machine using the normal process it is going to take a considerable
amount of time and effort.
But using
Vagrant we can configure and use this machine quickly as we installation time
and effort has been reduced significantly.
Vagrant for Developers
If you
are a developer, Vagrant will help you to isolate dependencies and their
corresponding configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment,
without sacrificing any of the tools you are used to working with (editors,
browsers, debuggers, etc.).
Once you
or someone else creates a single Vagrantfile, we just need to vagrant up and
everything is installed and configured for you to work. Other members of our
team create their development environments from the same configuration, so
whether you are working on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, all your team members
are running code in the same environment, against the same dependencies, all
configured the same way. Say goodbye to "works on my machine" bugs.
Vagrant for Operators
If you
are an operations engineer or DevOps engineer, Vagrant gives you a disposable
environment and consistent workflow for developing and testing infrastructure
management scripts.
With
this, you can quickly test things like shell scripts, Chef cookbooks, Puppet
modules, and more using local virtualization such as VirtualBox or
VMware.
Then,
with the same configuration, you can test these scripts on
remote clouds such as AWS or RackSpace with the same workflow.
Ditch
your custom scripts to recycle EC2 instances, stop juggling SSH prompts to
various machines, and start using Vagrant to bring sanity to your life.
Vagrant
for Everyone
Vagrant
is designed for everyone as the easiest and fastest way to create a virtualized
environment!
