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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Vagrant's really falls short of its promise of "the exact same dev environment for everyone" in my experience, especially because of VirtualBox issues such as, for example, relative symlinks breaking if done in a shared folder on a mismatched guest/host OS.

It's been such a source of frustration that there is no better shared folder alternative. VirtualBox is the only usable cross-platform backend, and vbox shared folders are the only way to have two-way syncing between guest and host. I don't understand why it's so poorly supported :/

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Shared filesystems of any sort are too slow for most application development purposes, especially if you've got a process like NPM on one of the sides trying to read and write 2.5gb of Javascript files.

We saw a 30% speedup in one of our apps by switching from NFS to two-way syncing between "native" filesystems using Unison.

See mitchellh's blog post on the subject:

http://mitchellh.com/comparing-filesystem-performance-in-vir...

trying to read and write 2.5gb of Javascript files

The technical term for this is "doing it wrong"

We ran into sym link problems with node/npm, but these were completely resolved by keeping the node_modules folder in the VM, not sym linked out to the host:

    mkdir /home/vagrant/node_modules
    ln -s /home/vagrant/node_modules /vagrant/node_modules

Vbox shared folders isn't the only way. You can use any tech that you can with "real" devices too if both guest and host has a support.

For example, when I started with vagrant, after few days of just getting bored with slow thoughput of vbox shared folders, I added nfs sharing. But cifs works as well.

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