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Vagrant is a great, free way to develop for the web locally
April 13, 2018

Vagrant is a great, free way to develop for the web locally

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vagrant

We use Vagrant to run virtual machines for local development of our web applications. Each team across our department uses it, but with various configurations. Vagrant allows us to test our applications locally using the same operating system and software configurations as our production servers, so we are able to get a better idea of how things will work once deployed.
  • Free
  • Local testing
  • Allows use of the same OS and software as the server
  • Pretty fast and reliable
  • Can be difficult to set up
  • Requires command line usage, which can be difficult for less tech savvy designers/developers
  • Can take up a lot of disk space if running several VMs with various configurations
  • Free way to develop locally
  • Everyone can run the exact same configuration, so there aren't inconsistencies between developers
  • Extra development time is needed to maintain Vagrant configurations
  • MAMP
MAMP is a much simpler solution than Vagrant. Pretty much anyone should be able to get MAMP up and running quickly, and it's much easier to maintain. However, MAMP is fairly limited to specific versions of software and runs within macOS, so it won't always completely be an accurate representation of the production environment. MAMP is also very geared toward PHP development with MySQL and an Apache server, although it does now allow for Nginx, Python, and Perl configurations.
Vagrant works well for the local development of any website or web application. It shouldn't be very difficult to set up for someone comfortable with Unix and command line usage. It's great for those wanting to get local development as close as possible to the production environment.

It's less appropriate for more design focused developers who are not super comfortable with the command line. Though once set up and configured, it's pretty easy to teach anyone how to use it.