Archival repost — originally published on my old blog on April 30, 2014. Already in English, lightly cleaned up for dev.to (fixed a few typos and reworded one sentence about Ansible's learning curve that read backwards in the original). Vagrant was the default way to spin up local dev VMs before Docker ate that space — most teams now reach for containers instead, but if you do need full VMs (kernel-level testing, OS-specific work), the Vagrant + Ansible combo below still works exactly like this. My example project is still up on GitHub.
Vagrant was the de facto standard for managing development machines. It lets you spin up a multi-VM development environment in seconds. For more details, see Vagrant Up.
Vagrant isn't a provisioning tool itself — it leverages existing ones, like Puppet and Ansible. Ansible was the new kid on the block at the time. Its learning curve isn't too steep: you just write your playbooks in YAML, and it's DevOps-friendly.
Give it a try — clone my example project, vagrant-lamp-ansible, and get started.
Top comments (0)