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HashiCorp Vagrant

Score10 out of 10

40 Reviews and Ratings

What is HashiCorp Vagrant?

Vagrant is a tool designed to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. It leverages a declarative configuration file which describes all software requirements, packages, operating system configuration, and users.

Vagrant: Repeatability and Matching Environments at the Cost of Training and Disk Bloat

Pros

  • Extremely efficient project scaffolding of a dev/test environment
  • Repeatable results (for the most part).
  • Great variety of community boxes and plugins
  • Free

Cons

  • Major updates have introduced bugs with consequences in our dev projects
  • Syntax updates have major repercussions for plugin compatibility
  • Community support is a lengthy process

Return on Investment

  • Local development makes for almost realtime visual feedback for front-end designers
  • Quick deployable environment tools gets my teams up and running very quickly
  • Disk size bloat resulting from hosting an OS in a VM can be problematic for portable users.

Alternatives Considered

Docker

Other Software Used

Slack, Trello, InVision, Final Cut Pro X, VMware ESXi, Shopify, Klaviyo, Facebook for Business, Later, Tableau Public, TSheets, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Ads (formerly AdWords), Google Search Console

Vagrant is great for Drupal Dev, but I prefer Lando

Pros

  • Speed vs other VMs
  • Documentation
  • Robust, older than many VMs

Cons

  • Not as fast as natively running Linux
  • Occasionally I've had to kill instances to start new ones
  • Can be more confusing to set up (especially auth) compared to native Linux

Return on Investment

  • Saved lots of time by being able to set up a local env quickly
  • Occasionally made troubleshooting bugs harder than it would have been using native Linux
  • Clients had issues setting it up, which may have provided us some security in keeping their business

Other Software Used

Node.js, The Okta Identity Cloud, GitHub

Good tool with minor issues for users on Windows machines.

Pros

  • Consistent, reliable virtual environments for web development
  • Easy to use commands

Cons

  • Lacks a GUI, would be useful for entry level users
  • Uses lots of resources on old machines
  • Compatibility issues with some operating systems (Windows 8.1 home, Windows 10 home)

Return on Investment

  • Faster kick offs on projects
  • Identical dev environments for users with different background and expertise

Alternatives Considered

Docker

Usability

Vagrant gives the flexibility and stability local development needs

Pros

  • Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
  • Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
  • I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.

Cons

  • The learning curve is steep for deploying a vagrant package if you've never dealt the command line.
  • Initially, it was a little difficult to get the networking right because I didn't have a lot of experience with using to the virtual machine.

Return on Investment

  • Vagrant has sped up and streamlined a lot of my local development. Spinning up a server is really quick and I don't have to spend a lot of time debugging my environment.

Other Software Used

WP Engine, MailChimp, Sizmek

Vagrant - a must have to integrate with Chef

Pros

  • Contained development environments on VMs, but with same structure as production environments
  • Open-source
  • Huge community
  • Easy to set up

Cons

  • It was great if Vagrant consumes less resources than what consumes today

Return on Investment

  • Vagrant had a very positive impact, since it was really easy to set up on our organisation, without any cost

Alternatives Considered

Docker and Microsoft Azure

Other Software Used

Slack, Zoom, Docker, Lokalise, Atlassian Confluence, Gitlab, Node.js, React, Android Studio, Cisco AnyConnect