Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments • Hacker News Board

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#21

Post by jcastro » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:16 PM UTC

neurostimulant wrote: post #2

Vagrant is absolutely fantastic. But I have an issue with the default precise64 box. If the vm is shut down abnormally (manual power off from virtualbox, unexpected power outage, etc), next time I run `vagrant up`, the vm would be stuck on grub. It appear to be a problem with ubuntu and I need to start the vm in gui mode (as opposed to vagrant's default headless mode) to resolve this (changed timeout=-1 to timeout=0…

Which exact precise64 box are you using? Ubuntu now publishes regularly updated Vagrant images, do you have this problem with this box?

- http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/precise/current/

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#22

Post by pearkes » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:21 PM UTC

pixelmonkey wrote: post #17

We switched from hand-configured boxes and a long, "full stack local" setup document to chef + vagrant at my current company ( http://parse.ly ). Though it caused some kicking & screaming on the development team, the end result is that every developer has the same development environment, which pretty much matches our deployment environment (in Rackspace Cloud). I also just kicked off our summer intern class, and the…

Here's how:

    $ VAGRANT_LOG=[debug, info, warn, or error] vagrant up

https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/lib/vagrant...

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#23

Post by mitchellh » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:24 PM UTC

mapleoin wrote: post #19

Vagrant is a nice tool, but I don't like the closed-open source part of it. There are 289 open issues and 79 open pull requests on github right now. It feels like there is a huge community out there who want to move this project forward, but there is the bottleneck of having only one committer who wants to have too much control over it. It's fine and the author can do what he wants, but I'm wondering what the project…

Actually, the number of issues/pull requests is higher than usual right now. You're right that at the moment I'm a bottleneck. I'm looking to change that (I want to add more committers).

However, historically I think I've been very good about responding to issues rather quickly. Unfortunately, the past 6 weeks I've been quite bad at it as I've been focussing on something you'll hopefully see in a few weeks. Again, this highlights the problem of being a bottleneck.

I'd love to promote more committers.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#24

Post by cabacon » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:26 PM UTC

I learned about vagrant from this old HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714149

I wanted to call out the advice from that article to use fabric (if you use python) to control the vagrant+VM instances. You use chef/puppet to configure the VM, and then use fabric to, for instance, switch between virtualenvs for different apps within the virtual host. I used it that summer to work on a web app while I took my daughter to swim lessons, and it was well worth my while.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#25

Post by WestCoastJustin » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:30 PM UTC

Vagrant is awesome! I use it to test ops changes and puppet deployments. If anyone is interested, I've created two screencasts about vagrant:

  Episode #4 - Vagrant [1]
  Episode #5 - Create a Vagrant box with Veewee [2]

[1] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant

[2] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-wit...

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#26

Post by indirectlylit » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:33 PM UTC

Zuph wrote: post #20

It looks like Vagrant is designed to help out web developers more than anything else. I develop primarily for microcontrollers, and it can be a pain to manage toolchains for different architectures. Would Vagrant help with that? Does anyone have an examples of using Vagrant like this?

I've been using it for microcontroller development lately and it seems like a nice way to preserve and share toolchain configuration. You define everything once (compilers, makefiles, drivers, etc) and then share it with people on your team, regardless of what OS they're using. VirtualBox allows you to set up USB port forwarding so you can even program and debug from the command-line.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#27

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:38 PM UTC

If you love vagrant, be sure to give the plugin 'Sahara' a try. It allows you to sandbox vagrant. so you can commit or rollback changes!

https://github.com/jedi4ever/sahara

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#28

Post by fideloper » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 5:39 PM UTC

mitchellh wrote: post #9

Vagrant creator here. What a pleasant surprise to see this pop up on HN this morning (it was unexpected, to be sure). I just want to shamelessly say that if you're more of a book person, the Vagrant O'Reilly book I wrote was just released this week, and it is a great way to get started: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026358.do Thanks! (And, hopefully as you know, as an author I make barely any royalties on an…

Will there be an update to cover version 2 of Vagrant? The comments seem to say that it only covers version 1 thoroughly.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#29

Post by jonbaer » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 6:06 PM UTC

A noob(ish) question but does anyone here use Vagrant by itself (or w/ chef-solo). For example can you do multi-VM setups directly to the AWS provider and local VirtualBox all on the same single Vagrantfile config? And thanks for the tip on veewee as it looks exactly what I was looking for to build a company basebox for faster testing. Much appreciated.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#30

Post by joelhaasnoot » Sun, Jun 09, 2013, 6:09 PM UTC

I use Vagrant for every project now. I used to work with a single VM with all of my projects, but dependencies were hard. Vagrant makes everything nicely sandboxed.

One thing I found difficult is that Chef or Puppet are hard to combine with Vagrant, not having used either before. The quality of instructions and recipes for simple stacks (PHP, Django, etc) even for Ubuntu require tweaks here and there. I've now however found recipes I've tweaked for both examples that work well.