Playing with Vagrant

Vagrant is one of those things I hear people talking about but that I’ve never gotten around to playing with, or hadn’t gotten around to playing with until today. Vagrant is a solution to the problem of setting up a local development environment for Web development. Depending on the platform you use, this can be rather difficult. I don’t even want to think about Windows development, but even in a Unix-like environment (OS X or Linux), you can still run into problems.

Basically, your system probably has some version of the language runtime you’re using that doesn’t match the server’s, and reconciling the difference is painful. I’ve always hated solutions like virtualenv and dvm. Vagrant works by running a full-blown virtual machine somewhat transparently. Helpfully, the virtual machine mounts one of your local directories so that you can edit files in your tool of choice but run your development server on the development machine, which should match your server pretty closely. For example, to experiment with Google App Engine development, I created a Vagrant instance using ubuntu/trusty64 (the latest Ubuntu LTS release), then I provisioned it using the following file:

apt-get update
apt-get install -y unzip
cd /vagrant
curl -s -O https://storage.googleapis.com/appengine-sdks/featured/google_appengine_1.9.15.zip
unzip -n -q google_appengine_1.9.15.zip

When the instance is provisioned, it automatically downloads the Google App Engine SDK and extracts it. Then I can dig in.

This is a super-simple application. Next I want to try setting up a Vagrant instance that’s provisioned using the chef server at work with our production Hadoop configuration so that I can easily launch Hadoop jobs from my laptop rather than logging into a remote machine to do it.