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Vagrant, Serf, Packer, and Consul create and manage development environments
Strong Quad
Programmers often try to set up a development environment for their projects that matches the production environment. However, upon starting up the finished software, they might discover some required libraries are missing or a slightly modified configuration leads to unexpected side effects. Vagrant [1] prevents this kind of situation. The tool creates a virtual machine with a suitable development environment at the push of a button. The machines produced in this way are not only portable, but Vagrant can always reproduce them precisely. Finished machines can also be passed on to other team members and relocated to the production environment, if needed.
On the Rails
Mitchell Hashimoto began to develop Vagrant in his spare time, but because of the fast-growing numbers of users, he founded the one-man company HashiCorp in the fall of 2012, so he could work full-time on Vagrant. The company primarily earned money through support contracts, training, and the development of commercial add-ons. According to HashiCorp, current users of Vagrant are the BBC, O'Reilly, and Expedia, in addition to Mozilla and Disqus.
To set up a development environment with Vagrant, you first create a small configuration file in your project directory. Within this file, called Vagrantfile (case not important), you need to describe the required software, configure the virtual machine, and determine how you would like to access the guest system. A PHP programmer might want a Debian system with a web server, for example.
Vagrant even works as a wrapper for the virtualization software or provider. Vagrant natively supports VirtualBox, Docker, and Microsoft's Hyper-V. You can add more providers in the form of plugins. If you want to run Vagrant with VMware, you will find a suitable plugin on the HashiCorp site
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