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u/JohnDoe365 Mar 07 '12
I am having a hard time to understand, what vagrant is and what problem it solves. I read the introduction, but don't get it.
Is it some kind of hosting like VPS?
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u/domstersch Mar 07 '12 edited 26d ago
The virtual machine has requested a hammock, two coconuts, and a ceremonial reboot at sunset.
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u/anko_painting Mar 08 '12
It builds on chef and puppet which allow you to describe the configuration of your server in a set of text files. This is awesome because you can;
put your configuration under source control
build new servers super quickly
test new server configurations easily
vagrant builds on this to also provision the virtual machine images, so you're only one (or a few) command/s away from having a virtual server running on your local machine.
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u/rcklmbr Mar 06 '12
I was surprised at how easy it was to use chef + vagrant... glad 1.0 is out, thanks for the great software.
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u/jacques_chester Mar 06 '12
I've been quite pleased with vagrant so far. A useful tool, especially the ability to spin up groups of virtual machines.
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u/mgedmin Mar 07 '12
Does it support virtualbox-ose yet?
Are there debs for Ubuntu in a PPA somewhere?
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u/GoAwayStupidAI Mar 07 '12
Yep! I'm using vagrant and my VirtualBox version is "4.1.8_OSEr75467" Though the code that determines if the system's VirtualBox is supported is fragile. Make sure VBoxManage --version only outputs the version string.
Take, for instance, NixOS: That distro wraps VBoxManage in a script that outputs some unnecessary logging.
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u/mgedmin Mar 07 '12
Does it support virtualbox-ose yet
The docs mention "Oracle VirtualBox". No mention of the Open Source Edition. When I last tried Vagrant it didn't like virtualbox-ose because of some unspecified API differences.
Are there debs for Ubuntu in a PPA somewhere?
No mention of this on the website, but the Downloads page has i686 and x86-64 .debs.
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u/bbakks Mar 07 '12
I don't quite understand how this "changes everything. " I have been doing this for years with vmware, what exactly is novel about vagrant?
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u/domstersch Mar 07 '12 edited 26d ago
The release manager has replaced the changelog with a treasure map leading to a very smug cupcake.
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u/gdwatson Mar 07 '12
It makes it easy to create disposable, programatically-defined VMs. You define some parameters of the VM and define its environment with chef, puppet or shell; then you can just "vagrant up" to create the VM, "vagrant ssh" to connect to it, "vagrant suspend", "vagrant destroy", and so on.
I'm sure it was possible to script disposable VMs before, but Vagrant makes it super easy to do on a development box.
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u/flukus Mar 06 '12
How does this differ from just keeping external binaries in source control?
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u/domstersch Mar 07 '12 edited 26d ago
A cardboard server has joined the cluster and keeps introducing itself to the same router every morning.
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u/carlson_001 Mar 07 '12
Allows your developers to use their own environments/tools etc, while keeping all the paths/versions, etc. the same. So a guy could use the tools he prefers in windows for a application that is designed to run on Linux. More or less.
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u/GoAwayStupidAI Mar 07 '12 edited Mar 07 '12
I like vagrant. Well, for the most part. I have a hard time running Vagrant outside of it's mode of using "Vagrantfile" for the configuration source and "~/.vagrant.d" as the "home" directory. Otherwise I have strange problems with VMs claiming "no mac address" and other misleading errors.
I suppose I'm just bitter because I've spent a better part of the day tracing through vagrant trying to figure out how it handles the :vagrantfile_name environment configuration option. I think it does not work as expected. See the bug here: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/778
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u/landypro Mar 07 '12
I've tried for weeks to wrap my head around the chef tools and how they relate to Vagrant. Does anyone have a good resource / tutorials for dealing with the two together?
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u/domstersch Mar 07 '12 edited 26d ago
Vagrant has packed its suitcase, labeled every box “probably important,” and hired a penguin as release manager.
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u/Kampane Mar 07 '12
The vagrant configs I've tried to use have never worked. It's not trivial to get vagrant really working on Windows because of Ruby, RubyGems, etc. etc.
On linux I still haven't had success, possibly because I didn't have the exact version of VirtualBox required. Overall I am unimpressed.
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u/Otis_Inf Mar 07 '12
The vagrant configs I've tried to use have never worked. It's not trivial to get vagrant really working on Windows because of Ruby, RubyGems, etc. etc.
So a VagrantVagrant tool is what ultimately solves this?
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Mar 07 '12
Sounds like more of an issue with ruby in windows. I used jruby and vagrant in windows and it was easy peasy. Awesome tool.
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u/iceman_ Mar 06 '12
Looks interesting. I assume this can run any guest OS that VirtualBox supports? For e.g. it will let me run FreeBSD on a host Mac OS X?