What is Vagrant?
Vagrant is an open source tool for building complete development environments using VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Docker containers, or other providers. It provides a consistent workflow for developers to easily create, configure, and destroy virtualized development environments.
Some key features of Vagrant include:
- Works across multiple virtualization platforms like VirtualBox and Hyper-V allowing the same Vagrant workflow to be used across different environments.
- Provisions development environments using automatic configuration scripts like shell scripts or Chef/Puppet.
- Creates disposable development environments that are consistent, fast, and portable across machines.
- Share or distribute development environments across teams with included support for Vagrant Cloud.
- Works well with continuous integration servers to test across multiple machines.
Vagrant enables developers to build customizable, isolated virtual development environments for platforms like Ubuntu, CentOS, and more. This allows coding against production-like environments without having to manually configure virtual machines or containers.
Kubernetes, Laragon, virt-manager, FreeBSD Jails, Apache Mesos, DDEV, Nanobox, Cycle.io, Chef Habitat, Dockercraft, Stakkr, DataCol, Arkose, Otto by HashiCorp are some alternatives to Vagrant.