"I would totally trust this guy to run my apps!"
What is Vagrant?
Vagrant is command line utility that is used for setting up virtual Linux boxes with Oracle's VirtualBox
Vagrant is useful if:
- You are a freelancer who works in many different development environments, and doesn't want a bajillion different services running on your machine.
- You are a sysadmin who want to test out new machine configurations without the expense of provisioning a new EC2 instance (and possibly forgetting to turn it off, whoops!)
- You work in a company where every developer needs their own development machine. Make some recipes in Chef, and now each member of the team can have an identically configured machine.
Wait, doesn't VirtualBox have a GUI?
Why yes, it does. However, using it is optional. Vagrant is simply another way to use VirtualBox. It also makes it easy to install different flavors of Linux, as we will see shortly.
How do I get started with Vagrant?
Go to the Vagrant website and download the latest version. Make sure you have VirtualBox, too. Once you've done those things, type these commands:
vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box vagrant init vagrant up