A must have in every developer's toolkit
February 21, 2017
A must have in every developer's toolkit
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vagrant
Vagrant is used for local development of websites, APIs and web applications. By being able to mimic the production server environment we're able to eliminate the potential for any compatibility issues that can occur when running the code on a different architecture than it was originally built on. It's also helpful in the reverse-- Vagrant ensures that every developer is using the exact same environment.
- Server Virtualization - it's easy to recreate a server environment and automate builds for other developers.
- Seamless integration between the server environment and local machine. This allows you to use your preferred editor, automation tools and other applications, but have the website run in a self-contained environment
- Community
- Learning curve is steep - It can be challenging for someone to set up initially. After some coaching, the basics come pretty quickly though.
- Relies on external Virtual Machine applications - It would be great if Vagrant itself could run the virtual machine instead of leaning on other virtualization software. This is a small detail, but would make setup simple.
- Better support for running
- Vagrant is free - It requires a bit of extra technical knowledge in terms of setup, but since it costs nothing it's an excellent resource
- It can be time consuming to learn, but once you get a good handle on it you're in good shape.
Vagrant is a little different than other options out there. It blurs the lines between the server environment and the local environment. Options like MAMP and XAMPP allow a developer to run a local version of Apache, MySQL and PHP locally, but it's all based on the local operating system. Applications also share resources which sometimes is less than ideal. Vagrant allows the application to be entirely sandboxed and built from the ground up. VMware Fusino, Parallels and VirtualBox are great for Virtualization as well but they require you to work in that environment which makes working with already established tools more challening.