Vagrant is a tool for building virtualized development environments. | Hacker News Reader

Vagrant is a tool for building virtualized development environments.

vagrantup.com

85 pointslox28 comments

Why hello there! I'm the maintainer/developer behind Vagrant and I'm happy to answer any questions there may be about the project whether it be conceptual or directly related to how Vagrant works.

I didn't expect to see this on HN today but I guess I'll just give a giant information dump here for those interested :)

Good links for those interested in what Vagrant is:

* "Why Vagrant?" - http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/why.html

* "Frequently Asked Questions" - http://vagrantup.com/faq.html

* The code - https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant

* The original HN submission when Vagrant was launched (286 days ago) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901

And then a quick update for those who want to know whats going on with the project now:

The project has been nonstop since January this year, and the codebase is nearing one year old. Vagrant is now on version 0.6.8. Vagrant is used by many companies worldwide and the 0.6.x series is considered stable. In September 2010 I gained sponsorship for my work on Vagrant by Engine Yard[1]. I've been working very hard for the past 2 months to get the project working with other hypervisors (KVM, VMWare), spurring other open source projects of my own in the process (libvirt-rb, virtuoso, you can find these at my github[2]).

[1]: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/mitchell-hashimoto-joins...

[2]: http://github.com/mitchellh

It's nice to see Engine Yard continuing to do things like the OSS Community Grant program. If only every company gave back a little...

Damn, I must have missed the initial submission.

I've been migrating our developer environments over at 99designs to use Vagrant and it's been fantastic. What was previously an unmaintainable shell script is now a re-usable collection of chef recipes and a brief Vagrantfile.

Thanks for your hard work!

Looks awesome......great job.

Vagrant is a great tool and I'd love to move my projects over to it. Here's hoping the 64bit Windows incompatibility can be fixed!

It can and will be fixed soon. :) Expect an announcement 'soon.'

This project looks great. VirtualBox runs on Solaris, an OS which supports writable snapshots and deduplication in the ZFS filesystem. Is there support for filesystem snapshots in Vagrant? It would be nice to spawn a new virtual machine from an existing on-disk snapshot.

I know Vagrant runs on Solaris, but I haven't done anything OS-specific for it, so I'm going to say "no" to this. Hit me up in IRC and we can talk about it.

VMWare support would be killer! I'm been promoting Vagrant at my place of employment for quite a while but Virtualbox and the lack of commericial support has been the main issue.

Working on it. Bad news though: VMWare Fusion (Mac OS X) doesn't expose a full API, so doing so there would be hard. VMWare Workstation on Windows does however, and is a target for the future.

the workstation part probably doesn't matter as much as esx/esxi.

Ideally I'd like to be able to build a vm in vagrant under virtualbox, and then push it out to a esx/esxi acceptance box, then push it out to a esx/esxi production box.

It would mean that the devs could build the images, then get ops to have a look over the config/add their own fixes, then deploy the fixes into production. Not many enterprises I know really want to run virtualbox in production.

Does Vagrant provide any way to create Ubuntu live CDs from a VirtualBox VM instance? If not, happen to know any projects which allow this? There is a rather long winded way to do it I found on the Ubuntu forums, but would pay well for a software tool that could do it.

Sorry, I don't know any easy way. I'm good at going the opposite way, but not from VM to CD ;)

Hi mitchellh. I haven't used vagrant yet but the tool looks great! It will probably be a superb addition to my day-to-day toolbox (I'm a new VirtualBox user). Thank you for creating the tool.

In a probably unrelated question to vagrant, would you happen to know if VirtualBox virtual hdd can be shrinked and expanded? And if VB can, does vagrant support that?

Use-case: one 8GB (only use 2GB total) vm instance to be moved from Windows Server to Ubuntu Linux. Or for cloning purposes. Copying 8GB probably would take a lot of time, compacting it to 2GB first then copying it to multiple machines probably would be a lot faster.

Thanks again for creating vagrant!

VirtualBox does not support resizing disks. You can use other tools (qemu command line comes to mind) to do things like this, but it takes a LONG time and is generally not worth it. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this space. "libguestfs" looks promising for the future, but I haven't evaluated if its useful for your purpose at the moment.

According to this: http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2010/12/virtualbox-4-beta-on-sol... resizing disks is coming in version 4!

I've always dreamed of carrying around a netbook to exotic locales and then firing up remote EC2 instances with huge multicpu servers and having a full dev setup for a few hours while in a cafe in the middle of the jungle.

you mean in a "cave" in the middle of the jungle right? :D

I can only say I plan on making this a reality in 2011.

I have an Archlinux base box available here: http://gotanysnacks.com/vagrant/

Also, it's well worth the effort to learn Chef (or another automated provisioning tool) if you haven't already. It makes working with Vagrant way easier and saves you time whenever you create a new environment. Plus you can use the same recipes on a production box, so the effort isn't wasted.

This is neat, I wish there was a screencast or something of the sort up to recap the major points of this application. Does anybody know from experience how flexible it is for recreating an environment close to your own on any *nix based system?

Would really love a KVM version, simply because you can't run VirtualBox while you have the KVM modules loaded which is annoying as I run multiple KVM VMs.

Is there any future chance of libvirt compatibility as an option?

I use vagrant every day, it's really a must-have for a complex stack.

Why is the Vagrant character missing the front of his footwear exposing his toes?

Regards

Joe

That'd be... because he's a vagrant.

Tried it several times on a Windows Box without success. Had troubles trying several Ruby versions, neither version worked.

Vagrant, for the time being, only works on 32-bit windows. I'm going to take a guess that you didn't get this working because it kept saying "VirtualBox not detected!" and you're on 64-bit. If this is the case, then work is currently underway to fix this.

If you're not on 64-bit windows, I'd love to work with you to hear what your experience was and what went wrong.

Negative experiences like the one you had are unfortunate, but through them we can fix it and make it better for everyone else.

You don't have any contact info in your profile, please contact me at mitchell.hashimoto@gmail.com or through github, irc, etc.

Should be 32bit - will contact you with the error messages - stephan.schmidt@interimcto.de should work otherwise.

The problems have been mentioned several times on the internet when I did google, but no solution were mentioned.

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