Vagrant gives the flexibility and stability local development needs
February 28, 2018

Vagrant gives the flexibility and stability local development needs

Collin Berg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vagrant

I switched to vagrant from DesktopServer for my local development stack when updating to High Sierra. Vagrant is a much more versatile and robust product that gives me flexibility and automation. I use it to spin up Wordpress websites locally and give them a local domain. DesktopServer only allowed 3 instances, but with Vagrant I can use as many as I need.
  • Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
  • Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
  • I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.
  • The learning curve is steep for deploying a vagrant package if you've never dealt the command line.
  • Initially, it was a little difficult to get the networking right because I didn't have a lot of experience with using to the virtual machine.
  • Vagrant has sped up and streamlined a lot of my local development. Spinning up a server is really quick and I don't have to spend a lot of time debugging my environment.
Previously I had used MAMP and DesktopServer. MAMP was constantly giving me MySQL problems and is frustrating in that it limits how many installs you can have. DesktopServers was a little better, but broke when i switched to High Sierra OSX. Their website and support were very lack luster and so I switched to Vagrant. Vagrant has been more flexible and faster to setup as well.
Vagrant is great if you are working on websites or applications locally and need to set up a container that manages the environment. I'm no longer struck with having to work only in one version of a language as well. I can debug locally with an old project in PHP 5.3 or work on a new project that uses PHP 7

Using Vagrant

1 - Vagrant is used for spinning up virtual servers for local development that we build websites on. We build Wordpress and Laravel websites on it.
  • Local Development
  • Local Debugging
  • Cross Platform Compatibility
  • Experiment with other containers that aren't just PHP sites. Possibly Node.js or python box.
Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.