Ask HN: Are you using vagrant? What do you use it for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you using vagrant? What do you use it for?

6 pointsghettolabs6 comments

About half way done with a project around vagrant and just trying to get some ideas if people are still using vagrant before I finish the project.

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I use it a lot. For work reasons I have to use Windows but I've always used Linux for development so I just use vagrant instead of managing VMs directly from Virtual Box. I run vagrant up, then ssh into the VM using putty and inside putty I use my regular vim+tmux setup.

I used Vagrant back when I deployed into VMs. I haven't used it since I switched to using Kubernetes, as I can just run my container against minikube or a dev cluster and pretty much get I want. Great tool.

it depends I don't use it for local development. It is a great way to launch local machines but if all you are doing is coding apps with python/ node ./ruby etc then vagrant is overkill when you can use docker compose and docker files. What project are you working on ?

I'm working on a python app that uses vagrant or docker for teams. So it allows you to customize a vagrant box with ansible for example and share it with your co-worker. It also has an option to launch it as a docker container if you would rather use docker. I'm about half way done and just wanted to find out if it would be worth it to finish :)

I'm using vagrant to work on our legacy system which is not fully migrated to docker, yet.

We used it for some testing environments, and Docker largely removed the need for it for us as well. A simple docker-compose file is often far quicker to start and with much less local system overhead than the typical VM vagrant might spit out. It’s also much more reliable - if “docker-compose up” passes for me, it’s very unlikely to fail for others. Vagrant has much more external dependencies (things like virtualbox etc) and often users can have differing versions that introduce all kinds of fun issues.

Personally I now just put a little effort into shoving whatever software we might need into a container, it’s usually not that difficult for web app style stacks.

I am by no means arguing docker plus docker-compose is a 1:1 replacement for vagrant, but for many use cases I think it can be much nicer. I would only resort to vagrant in the event containers cant solve the task at hand now.

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