Vagrant is a source-available software product for building and maintaining

portable Portable may refer to: General * Portable building, a manufactured structure that is built off site and moved in upon completion of site and utility work * Portable classroom, a temporary building installed on the grounds of a school to provide a ...

virtual software development environments; e.g., for

VirtualBox Oracle VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and InnoTek VirtualBox) is a hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox was originally created by InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH, which was ac ...

, KVM,

Hyper-V Hyper-V is a native hypervisor developed by Microsoft; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. It is included in Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows (since Windows 8) as an optional feature to be manually enabled. A ...

, Docker containers, VMware, Parallels, and AWS. It tries to simplify the

software configuration management Software configuration management (SCM), a.k.a. software change and configuration management (SCCM), is the software engineering practice of tracking and controlling changes to a software system; part of the larger cross-disciplinary field of ...

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

in order to increase development productivity. Vagrant is written in the Ruby language, but its ecosystem supports development in a few other languages.

History

Vagrant was first started as a personal side-project by Mitchell Hashimoto in January 2010. The first version of Vagrant was released in March 2010. In October 2010, Engine Yard declared that they were going to sponsor the Vagrant project. The first stable version, Vagrant 1.0, was released in March 2012, exactly two years after the original version was released. In November 2012, Mitchell formed an organization called

HashiCorp HashiCorp, Inc. is an American software company with a freemium business model based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides tools and products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run and co ...

to support the full-time development of Vagrant; Vagrant remained permissively licensed

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

. HashiCorp now works on creating commercial editions and provides professional support and training for Vagrant. Vagrant was originally tied to

, but version 1.1 added support for other virtualization software such as VMware and KVM, and for server environments like

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ap ...

. Vagrant is written in

Ruby Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...

, but it can be used in projects written in other

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s such as

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

, Python,

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, C#, and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

. Since version 1.6, Vagrant natively supports Docker containers, which in some cases can serve as a substitute for a fully virtualized operating system.

Architecture

Vagrant uses "Provisioners" and "Providers" as building blocks to manage the development environments. Provisioners are tools that allow users to customize the configuration of virtual environments.

Puppet A puppet is an object, often resembling a human, animal or Legendary creature, mythical figure, that is animated or manipulated by a person called a puppeteer. Puppetry is an ancient form of theatre which dates back to the 5th century BC in anci ...

and

Chef A chef is a professional Cook (profession), cook and tradesperson who is proficient in all aspects of outline of food preparation, food preparation, often focusing on a particular cuisine. The word "chef" is derived from the term (), the di ...

are the two most widely used provisioners in the Vagrant

ecosystem An ecosystem (or ecological system) is a system formed by Organism, organisms in interaction with their Biophysical environment, environment. The Biotic material, biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and en ...

(

Ansible The term ''ansible'' refers to a category of fictional technological devices capable of superluminal Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than ...

has been available since at least 2014). Providers are the services that Vagrant uses to set up and create virtual environments. Support for

, and Docker virtualization ships with Vagrant, while VMware and AWS are supported via plugins. Vagrant sits on top of virtualization software as a wrapper and helps the developer interact easily with the providers. It automates the configuration of virtual environments using

, and the user does not have to directly use any other virtualization software. Machine and software requirements are written in a file called "Vagrantfile" to execute necessary steps in order to create a development-ready box. "Box" is a format and an extension (.box) for Vagrant environments that is copied to another machine in order to replicate the same environment. The official Vagrant documentation details the installation, command line usage, and relevant configuration of Vagrant.

License change

HashiCorp announced on Aug 10, 2023 that it changed the license of Vagrant from the MIT license to the Business Source License 1.1.

References

External links

* {{Official website
List of Vagrant boxes

Business Source License
Cross-platform software Provisioning Virtualization software for Linux Software using the Business Source License