Vagrant 1.4

[WestCoastJustin]

For anyone who doesn't know. Vagrant acts like a wrapper around VMware, VirtualBox, or even AWS, so that you can easily automate testing. You can also share your Vagrant boxes (images) with others in an easy manner. Vagrant is one of those things, that once you start to use it, you wonder how you managed without it. I have created several screencasts about Vagrant:

Learning Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant

Create a Vagrant box with Veewee @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-wit...

Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag...

Managing Iptables with Puppet @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/18-managing-iptables-with-...

[xwowsersx]

Hey, these are great screencasts, just what I was looking for. Would be awesome to see a screencast that shows how to get an EC2 instance up and running using vagrant.

[haberman]

Can you explain what Vagrant adds on top of VirtualBox? When I tried it it didn't seem that different than just using VirtualBox directly.

[concise_unicorn]

Thanks for the screencasts, now I may finally get around to giving it a try.

[kyberias]

I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works. The home page didn't help me with that AT ALL. It's full of vague terms like "development environment" and "work environment" and buzzwords claiming to "maximize productivity".

In your About page, please describe the typical USAGE SCENARIOS of your software and how does it help in those cases exactly.

[mitchellh]

This is linked in the 2nd sentence in the getting started section that is linked from one of the two biggest call-to-actions on the homepage: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/

I'm sorry you couldn't find that!

[coldtea]

>I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works.

Well, it's 2013 and you're on HN. If you don't already know what Vagrant is, then perhaps you're not the most qualified information seeker.

[FooBarWidget]

I had hoped that their Docker support would be some magical mechanism that would treat Docker as a kind of VirtualBox. That is, instead of using VirtualBox to create VMs, they would use Docker to create containers. 'vagrant ssh' would then SSH directly into a container instead of the host VM.

Sadly, their Docker support is just a provisioner. :( I can do that myself too in a shell script.

[johnbellone]

There's not really a way to do that uniformly right now on any system that isn't Linux. I agree that it would be ideal, but the core philosophy behind Vagrant is a single configuration recipe to create portable environments (development). You can do a lot of things in shell scripts, but its still easier to have it all in one place in an easily grokable format.

[bryanlarsen]

It sounds like you want vagrant-lxc.

[TheHippo]

If that is what you want, then just install docker on your system ;-)

[misnome]

I like vagrant, but would love it to work with VMWare fusion, but cannot justify paying more than the cost of fusion for a vagrant plugin.

Anyone aware of an open source alternative to the official VMWare provisioner?

[i386]

Why is using Virtual Box not an option if you are price sensitive?

[eyepulp]

We're using vagrant and ansible to manage local dev instances with the same ansible scripts responsible for provisioning/deployment to our production boxes. My thought being the less I manage with vagrant, and the more I codify stuff in ansible, the more predictable things are when I go to provision/deploy in production.

I'm thrilled with how vagrant helps the process locally, but at the same time want to do as little as possible in vagrant because it's not applicable/involved when I provision/manage a box @ Linode or Digital Ocean.

Am I under-utilizing vagrant? Or missing a greater benefit by limiting its role?

[NDizzle]

I'm afraid of upgrading vagrant now like I am afraid of upgrading bootstrap.

Too many things break - it's simply not worth the trouble of upgrading and finding all the gotchas scattered all over the place in my config files and code.

[mitchellh]

I started the vagrant-spec project to address this. A system like Vagrant is hard to fully unit test because there are a lot of side-effecty things that it does. In many cases, the best way to test it is to run things in a real-life scenario.

vagrant-spec includes a acceptance suite that we're going to be building up in order to test more of the features in a black box manner. It is slow to run but if we verify that things are passing before a release, we should be able to catch most daily use cases.

Vagrant 1.4 is the first release to run through vagrant-spec and while there are some early bug reports in some fringe areas of Vagrant trickling in, Vagrant seems to be a drop-in upgrade for most users. This shows that it is working, to some extent. And it'll only get better.

Of course, if you're nervous about it, it doesn't hurt to wait for a 1.4.1 or so on.

[cleaver]

I know what you mean... However, the upgrade process has gotten a lot more reliable lately. At least less problems for me.

[joemaller1]

Congratulations to mitchellh and the Vagrant team. Vagrant is a fantastic tool for streamlining workflows, but also an amazing educational opportunity. Disposable Linux servers: Play, experiment, destroy, try again. Thank you for this, I can't believe how much I've learned.

[peter_l_downs]

> Work will begin on pulling the Vagrant AWS integration into the core distribution -- to start -- so that you can use Vagrant with AWS (and other providers) right after installing it and without having to juggle plugin versions.

This is awesome, I can't wait. I've been waiting for this!

[johnbellone]

I am thrilled about this as well.

Most of my projects right now have had all of their Vagrant plugin dependencies, including Vagrant itself, in the Gemfile because I wanted to make sure any developer could get a workable development environment without worrying too much about Vagrant versions. On one hand I like the fact that I can install up-to-date plugins this way, but on the other hand I just want it to work out of the box.

Although I doubt we'll be able to get away from this. More likely it will cause other frustrations such as needing to override a plugin with a monkey patch, etc.

[tedivm]

This is fantastic! I just used Vagrant to help automate testing on an email library I wrote (https://github.com/tedivm/Fetch, if anyone is interested- new tests are in the "testing" branch).

Vagrant made setting that up really easy. In fact, the hardest part was scripting different responses for whether the machine was already up or not, and the new Machine-Readable Output will make that far, far easier.

Thanks for making a great tool better!

[stormbrew]

Probably not the right venue, but I'm a bit disappointed addressing the plugin versioning situation isn't listed as a thing for 1.5. There are plugins for managing plugins but they're really less than ideal.

I'd honestly just like to use bundler for it, since it's almost certainly better than anything anyone's likely to make to replace it, but using bundler to run vagrant is currently considered bad for some reason and outputs a frightening warning.

[mitchellh]

Bundler doesn't work with Vagrant because Vagrant ships with its own Ruby and RubyGems and all that. So... your Bundler you're executing has a really screwed up state of the world.

Its something that certainly needs to be solved, but I think solutions needs more time to mature in my head as well as others.

[peteridah]

Vagrant is an awesome tool for CI. I have used it extensively with Jenkins to provision environments, AWS deployments and Digital Ocean Servers. Recently I have used vagrant to easily manage OSX 10.8 guests on vmware-fusion, as the demand to provision environments for ios-related development is on the increase. I am not aware of any other tool that makes this easier. Vagrant RAWKS!

[mradmin]

So you can now enforce vagrant versions in your Vagrantfile, which is great, but this is a new feature thus older versions of vagrant won't honour it...so this feature is useless for me, at least for a while. I will continue to do this: https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/7803472

[fsargent]

Vagrant 1.4 is now available by Brew Cask

https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/pull/2027

$ brew update

$ brew cask install vagrant

[pezh0re]

As someone who uses Vagrant for a ton of puppet testing, the part about the Windows guests in 1.5 made me incredibly happy.

[poseid]

Anyone can give a short summary on what Docker adds/does different from server automation, e.g. Chef provisioner?

[yeukhon]

The machine-readable output is interesting.

[andyl]

Docker provisioner - that's great. I could use Ansible to provision Docker containers, but its nice to have a built-in option as well.