Post summary: Brief description on Vagrant and when and why to use it.
This post is a preface to a series of posts where I will describe in details with examples how to configure and run Vagrant.
What is Vagrant
Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity, and makes the “works on my machine” excuse a relic of the past. Vagrant is convenient to share virtual environment setup and configurations.
How Vagrant works
Vagrant does not provide virtualization engines but builds on top of already existing such as VirtualBox which is the default provider, VMWare, Hyper-V or Docker. Vagrant providers are available as plugins so can be easily installed and used. Simply said Vagrant spins up a virtual machine for you, configures it and installs software on it. All those actions are described in a single text file, called Vagrantfile, that can be shared among team members allowing everyone to have one and the same setup.
Why use Vagrant
Vagrant allows us very easily to share setups between team members allowing very easy spin up of a work environment. For me, the important reason to use Vagrant is test how your deployment works, i.e. provisioning, locally before pushing those changes to other environments. Other important use cases I’ve seen is to create own development/test environment which is very hard to create on a local machine. This was a huge Tomcat application consisting of tens of configuration files with hundreds of configuration values which was not possible to provision on the local box, here Vagrant came to a rescue applying Chef cookbook used for deployment on physical hosts.
Provisioning
Provisioning is all tasks related to deployment and configurations of applications making them ready to use. In the past, this was done with many scripts or manual steps, which was quite unreliable and error-prone. Nowadays tools like Chef or Ansible allow automatic deployment and configuration of applications. This is a proper way to do deployments as it eliminates the human error and speeds up deployment. Once you have your Chef cookbook or Ansible playbook ready you want to test them if they work properly. Here comes the true value of Vagrant, you can test locally changes which otherwise may break some shared environment and stop work for many people.
Why is this post existing?
This post has no real practical value. Its purpose is to introduce Vagrant and to serve as a preface to three other posts from Vagrant series:
- Run Dropwizard Java application on Vagrant – showing actual examples what Vagrantfile should look like.
- Run Docker container on Vagrant – actual examples how to build and run Docker container on Vagrant
- Run multiple machines in a single Vagrant file – how to define two machines and spin them up at once with a single Vagrantfile.
Conclusion
Vagrant provides an easy way to define and share a different application or environment setup in a single text file called Vagrantfile. Vagrant uses virtualization engines like VirtualBox, VMWare or Hyper-V and builds on top of them. Most valuable usage I’ve seen Vagrant used for is to test your provisioning scripts and also provision an application which otherwise would be very hard to run manually on a local machine. Enjoy reading post with actual configurations and Vagrantfile examples.
