Vagrant 1.4

http://www.vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-4.html

by bpierre • 13 years ago

169 61 13 years ago

pezh0re• 13 years ago

As someone who uses Vagrant for a ton of puppet testing, the part about the Windows guests in 1.5 made me incredibly happy.

yeukhon• 13 years ago

The machine-readable output is interesting.

WestCoastJustin• 13 years ago

For anyone who doesn't know. Vagrant acts like a wrapper around VMware, VirtualBox, or even AWS, so that you can easily automate testing. You can also share your Vagrant boxes (images) with others in an easy manner. Vagrant is one of those things, that once you start to use it, you wonder how you managed without it. I have created several screencasts about Vagrant:

Learning Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant

Create a Vagrant box with Veewee @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-wit...

Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag...

Managing Iptables with Puppet @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/18-managing-iptables-with-...

haberman• 13 years ago

Can you explain what Vagrant adds on top of VirtualBox? When I tried it it didn't seem that different than just using VirtualBox directly.

ineedtosleep• 13 years ago

Not the parent post, but from my limited use of Vagrant so far, the main difference is that there's a "base" image that you can quickly reset to in order to test the repeat-ability of your deploys. The images also automatically handle VirtualBox's shared folders feature and require little for configuration.

Other than that, I agree it's almost like just using VBox directly.

mitchellh4• 13 years ago

The biggest thing it adds on top of VirtualBox is a consistent workflow. If it helps, think of what Vagrant does technically as useless, and think of Vagrant only as a process discipline: to get a dev environment for any project you "vagrant up", to close it out "vagrant destroy", to access it "vagrant ssh", etc.

As soon as you get this consistent workflow, then you can teach it to your entire organization and the whole company knows that ANY project in the company can be worked on using this workflow without any dependencies on their own machine.

And if ops decides to suddenly change the dev environment from VirtualBox to say... AWS... nothing changes! I've had large companies (200+ developers) switch from VirtualBox to VMware to AWS for their dev environments without their developers ever really noticing.

That is pretty cool.

Of course, on top of this, you get a lot of nice things: you get provisioners, you get automatic network configuration, you get the entire plugin community, you don't have to worry about stability on your own because you tap the collective stability of thousands of users, etc.

But the real power is workflow.

AaronBBrown2• 13 years ago

I use Vagrant daily. Here's an example I was working on today.

I needed to spin up 5 servers, a load balancer and 2 groups of 2 backend servers. I needed to provision them with Chef, have full name resolution, and be able to access the servers from my host machine.

Here's my Vagrantfile

    Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-chef-zero"
    Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-berkshelf"
    Vagrant.require_plugin "landrush"

    last_ip_octet = 10
    DOMAIN = "vagrant.dev"

    Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
      config.landrush.enable
      config.chef_zero.chef_repo_path = "./"
      config.omnibus.chef_version = '11.8.0'
      config.vm.box = "opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless"
      config.vm.box_url = "https://opscode-vm.s3.amazonaws.com/vagrant/opscode_ubuntu-12.04_provisionerless.box"

      %w{default metrics}.each do |backend|
        (1..2).each do |i|
          config.vm.define "be_#{backend}_#{i}".to_sym do |cfg|
            last_ip_octet += 1
            cfg.vm.hostname = "be-#{backend}-#{i}.#{DOMAIN}"
            cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s
            cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
              chef.node_name = "be-#{backend}-#{i}"
              chef.add_role "backend_#{backend}"
            end
          end
        end
      end

      config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "/usr/bin/apt-get update --fix-missing"
      config.vm.define :lb do |cfg|
        last_ip_octet += 1
        lb_ip = "192.168.33."+last_ip_octet.to_s

        cfg.vm.hostname = "lb.#{DOMAIN}"
        cfg.vm.network :private_network, :ip => lb_ip
        cfg.vm.provision :chef_client do |chef|
          chef.node_name = "lb"
          chef.add_role "lb"
        end
      end
    end

This utilizes a few vagrant plugins, vagrant-chef-zero, vagrant-berkshelf, and landrush which are one liners each to install. After that, I can type

    vagrant up  # build my stack from scratch
    vagrant destroy # destroy my stack
    vagrant ssh lb # ssh into the lb instance
    vagrant provision # execute chef (puppet, ansible, bash, etc)

Can you show me equivalent code that fulfills all my requirements using VirtualBox directly and will allow me to change a couple lines to spin this same infrastructure up in AWS or using VMWare?

coldtea5• 13 years ago

What? Automatically installing VirtualBox images, and setting them up with a development environment in 2-3 commands does seem "that different than just using VirtualBox directly"?

concise_unicorn• 13 years ago

Thanks for the screencasts, now I may finally get around to giving it a try.

xwowsersx• 13 years ago

Hey, these are great screencasts, just what I was looking for. Would be awesome to see a screencast that shows how to get an EC2 instance up and running using vagrant.

andyl• 13 years ago

Docker provisioner - that's great. I could use Ansible to provision Docker containers, but its nice to have a built-in option as well.

tedivm• 13 years ago

This is fantastic! I just used Vagrant to help automate testing on an email library I wrote (https://github.com/tedivm/Fetch, if anyone is interested- new tests are in the "testing" branch).

Vagrant made setting that up really easy. In fact, the hardest part was scripting different responses for whether the machine was already up or not, and the new Machine-Readable Output will make that far, far easier.

Thanks for making a great tool better!

peter_l_downs• 13 years ago

Work will begin on pulling the Vagrant AWS integration into the core distribution -- to start -- so that you can use Vagrant with AWS (and other providers) right after installing it and without having to juggle plugin versions.

This is awesome, I can't wait. I've been waiting for this!

johnbellone2• 13 years ago

I am thrilled about this as well.

Most of my projects right now have had all of their Vagrant plugin dependencies, including Vagrant itself, in the Gemfile because I wanted to make sure any developer could get a workable development environment without worrying too much about Vagrant versions. On one hand I like the fact that I can install up-to-date plugins this way, but on the other hand I just want it to work out of the box.

Although I doubt we'll be able to get away from this. More likely it will cause other frustrations such as needing to override a plugin with a monkey patch, etc.

merqumab• 13 years ago

I really like how Gradle has solved this problem. You check in the Gradle wrapper (http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper....) into your source control (it's only 56K), and it automatically fetches Gradle for you if you don't have it. Updating the project's Gradle version is just a matter of changing one or two lines.

It's cool to think that the only requirement for anybody to jump into a Gradle project is to have the JDK installed. "git clone <project>", "./gradlew assemble" is all it takes for you to fetch all your dependencies and build the project.

I think it'd be interesting to see if Vagrant could incorporate something like this; it sounds like it would help your use case.

NDizzle• 13 years ago

I'm afraid of upgrading vagrant now like I am afraid of upgrading bootstrap.

Too many things break - it's simply not worth the trouble of upgrading and finding all the gotchas scattered all over the place in my config files and code.

mitchellh4• 13 years ago

I started the vagrant-spec project to address this. A system like Vagrant is hard to fully unit test because there are a lot of side-effecty things that it does. In many cases, the best way to test it is to run things in a real-life scenario.

vagrant-spec includes a acceptance suite that we're going to be building up in order to test more of the features in a black box manner. It is slow to run but if we verify that things are passing before a release, we should be able to catch most daily use cases.

Vagrant 1.4 is the first release to run through vagrant-spec and while there are some early bug reports in some fringe areas of Vagrant trickling in, Vagrant seems to be a drop-in upgrade for most users. This shows that it is working, to some extent. And it'll only get better.

Of course, if you're nervous about it, it doesn't hurt to wait for a 1.4.1 or so on.

cleaver• 13 years ago

I know what you mean... However, the upgrade process has gotten a lot more reliable lately. At least less problems for me.

FooBarWidget2• 13 years ago

I had hoped that their Docker support would be some magical mechanism that would treat Docker as a kind of VirtualBox. That is, instead of using VirtualBox to create VMs, they would use Docker to create containers. 'vagrant ssh' would then SSH directly into a container instead of the host VM.

Sadly, their Docker support is just a provisioner. :( I can do that myself too in a shell script.

johnbellone2• 13 years ago

There's not really a way to do that uniformly right now on any system that isn't Linux. I agree that it would be ideal, but the core philosophy behind Vagrant is a single configuration recipe to create portable environments (development). You can do a lot of things in shell scripts, but its still easier to have it all in one place in an easily grokable format.

bryanlarsen• 13 years ago

It sounds like you want vagrant-lxc.

TheHippo• 13 years ago

If that is what you want, then just install docker on your system ;-)

shykes2• 13 years ago

To use docker on my mac I have replaced Vagrant with boot2docker (http://github.com/steeve/boot2docker). I didn't need all the moving parts anyway - the VM is always the same, the application-specific bits are all defined inside the containers.

FooBarWidget2• 13 years ago

I'm on OS X.

kyberias3• 13 years ago

I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works. The home page didn't help me with that AT ALL. It's full of vague terms like "development environment" and "work environment" and buzzwords claiming to "maximize productivity".

In your About page, please describe the typical USAGE SCENARIOS of your software and how does it help in those cases exactly.

mitchellh4• 13 years ago

This is linked in the 2nd sentence in the getting started section that is linked from one of the two biggest call-to-actions on the homepage: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/

I'm sorry you couldn't find that!

dugmartin• 13 years ago

Thanks for yor work Mitchell. I use Vagrant everyday.

kyberias3• 13 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out. I still think it would need a concrete example or two. The text is very abstract, long sentences with multiple consecutive adjectives describing how easy it is to use and how powerful it all is. A lot of fluff really. You're trying to sell the idea, not describe how it works.

I'm SURE it's a fine tool and I'm just trying to help you communicating it better. :)

coldtea5• 13 years ago

I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works.

Well, it's 2013 and you're on HN. If you don't already know what Vagrant is, then perhaps you're not the most qualified information seeker.

risratorn• 13 years ago

a little harsh ... but actually and unfortunately true :/

teh_klev2• 13 years ago

Well to be fair the "Why Vagrant?" page [1] isn't exactly clear about whether this is a tool for building throwaway environments or if it's something I should use to build out production systems:

"If you're a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single ==>disposable<=="

"If you're an operations engineer, Vagrant gives you a ==>disposable<== environment"

All I can infer from the page is that this is a tool for building throwaway/local environments running on VM's on my desktop. But there isn't any context given on how this relates to my production environments, i.e. getting from Vagrant instance to production, there's a disconnect there for me.

[1] http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/

kyberias3• 13 years ago

I didn't know what Vagrant was. Ofcourse I could have googled a bit but I decided to "test" the webpages whether they provided me the info I wanted. They kinda didn't.

Whether I SHOULD HAVE known about Vagrant, I'll let you decide. ;)

stormbrew2• 13 years ago

Probably not the right venue, but I'm a bit disappointed addressing the plugin versioning situation isn't listed as a thing for 1.5. There are plugins for managing plugins but they're really less than ideal.

I'd honestly just like to use bundler for it, since it's almost certainly better than anything anyone's likely to make to replace it, but using bundler to run vagrant is currently considered bad for some reason and outputs a frightening warning.

mitchellh4• 13 years ago

Bundler doesn't work with Vagrant because Vagrant ships with its own Ruby and RubyGems and all that. So... your Bundler you're executing has a really screwed up state of the world.

Its something that certainly needs to be solved, but I think solutions needs more time to mature in my head as well as others.

stormbrew2• 13 years ago

The problem right now is that plugins create a screwed up state of the world and their usefulness is rapidly climbing.

Installing the vagrant-chef-zero plugin, for example, is a real PITA because the dependency resolution doesn't deal with a json dependency correctly leading to it or chef zero failing to load unless you install them in a very specific order.

On the other end of the spectrum, when you're writing a Vagrantfile it's technically almost impossible to know what's going to happen when a user starts it up because of all the hooks plugins can throw in, and you can't tell Vagrant not to load a plugin (which would be an incomplete solution anyways, since I can't know what plugins or plugin versions will have bad interactions).

I know you wrote vagrant, so you have a more inside perspective on this, but as a user and occasional plugin writer, it feels like with a gemfile I can specify a state of the world that's considerably less screwed up than the completely random world any given user's install of Vagrant might be.

misnome• 13 years ago

I like vagrant, but would love it to work with VMWare fusion, but cannot justify paying more than the cost of fusion for a vagrant plugin.

Anyone aware of an open source alternative to the official VMWare provisioner?

i386• 13 years ago

Why is using Virtual Box not an option if you are price sensitive?

aks314• 13 years ago

VirtualBox is getting better, but it's still no match for vmware's performance(especially file share).

joemaller1• 13 years ago

Congratulations to mitchellh and the Vagrant team. Vagrant is a fantastic tool for streamlining workflows, but also an amazing educational opportunity. Disposable Linux servers: Play, experiment, destroy, try again. Thank you for this, I can't believe how much I've learned.

eyepulp• 13 years ago

We're using vagrant and ansible to manage local dev instances with the same ansible scripts responsible for provisioning/deployment to our production boxes. My thought being the less I manage with vagrant, and the more I codify stuff in ansible, the more predictable things are when I go to provision/deploy in production.

I'm thrilled with how vagrant helps the process locally, but at the same time want to do as little as possible in vagrant because it's not applicable/involved when I provision/manage a box @ Linode or Digital Ocean.

Am I under-utilizing vagrant? Or missing a greater benefit by limiting its role?

mradmin• 13 years ago

So you can now enforce vagrant versions in your Vagrantfile, which is great, but this is a new feature thus older versions of vagrant won't honour it...so this feature is useless for me, at least for a while. I will continue to do this: https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/7803472

poseid• 13 years ago

Anyone can give a short summary on what Docker adds/does different from server automation, e.g. Chef provisioner?

peteridah• 13 years ago

Vagrant is an awesome tool for CI. I have used it extensively with Jenkins to provision environments, AWS deployments and Digital Ocean Servers. Recently I have used vagrant to easily manage OSX 10.8 guests on vmware-fusion, as the demand to provision environments for ios-related development is on the increase. I am not aware of any other tool that makes this easier. Vagrant RAWKS!

fsargent• 13 years ago

Vagrant 1.4 is now available by Brew Cask

https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/pull/2027

$ brew update

$ brew cask install vagrant

Vagrant 1.4

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