Vagrant — a unified development environment for the whole team

Every developer on the team had a different operating system, a different version of Java, a differently configured Tomcat. The result? “Works on my machine” became our unofficial motto. Then we discovered Vagrant and everything changed.

The problem: snowflake environments¶

In a team of twelve developers we had at least five different configurations. Someone on Windows 7, someone on Windows 8, two colleagues on Ubuntu, one on Fedora. Everyone had a different JDK version, different environment variables, a different way of running the local database. Onboarding a new colleague took two days — two days of setting up the environment, finding the right library versions, solving mysterious errors.

Vagrant: a virtual machine as code¶

Vagrant from HashiCorp lets you describe a development environment in a single file — the Vagrantfile. It is a Ruby DSL, but you do not need to know Ruby. A few lines and you have a virtual machine with precisely defined software.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 8080, host: 8080
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 5432, host: 5432
  config.vm.provision "shell", path: "provision.sh"
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.memory = "2048"
    vb.cpus = 2
  end
end

The provisioning script installs JDK 7, Tomcat 7, PostgreSQL 9.3, and Maven 3.1 — exactly the versions we need. No surprises, no deviations. A new developer joins, clones the repo, runs vagrant up, and has a running environment within 10 minutes.

Multi-machine setup¶

For more complex projects, Vagrant allows you to define multiple machines in one Vagrantfile. Each machine has its own IP on a private network. This lets us simulate the production topology locally — application server + database server + message broker.

Shared folders link source code from the host system into the VM. The developer writes code in their preferred IDE on the host; compilation happens inside the VM.

Provisioning: Shell vs. Chef vs. Puppet¶

Vagrant supports several provisioners. We started with a shell script — understandable for everyone. The important thing is that provisioning is idempotent — you can run it multiple times without side effects. When you add a new dependency, a vagrant provision is all it takes and everyone has it.

Problems¶

Performance: VirtualBox on older laptops runs slowly. Shared folders via Guest Additions are slow — NFS is better, but does not work easily on Windows. Box size: Over a gigabyte; downloading takes time. Docker vs. Vagrant: We hear about Docker and are wondering whether containers will replace VMs. For now they are complementary tools.

Vagrant saved us hundreds of hours¶

Since introducing Vagrant, onboarding is a matter of minutes, not days. Everyone works on an identical environment. If you have a team larger than two people, Vagrant is an investment that pays off on the first day.