A better alternative to Vagrant

Question

We use Vagrant for dev environment automation and provisioning. It works smoothly. But sometimes, if vagrant has some problem(we faced LOT of them starting from SSH to networking config), the new developers who join us and are supposed to just boot up the box and start working, have a really hard time coping up with that. So I was just wondering, ain't there some easier way(like having a GUI like VirtualBox to start and end an env) of managing these virtual environments?
maybe my question should be, What are the best practices on this area, other than Vagrant?

Haunt

I hear you. Vagrant is a 250MB download for Windows. I thought OK it must contain VirtualBox but no it doesn't, so it's another few hundreds megs on top of that. Then there is the image, I'm around 1GB and haven't started any work yet. No. – Algonquian

Answer 1

Vagrant uses virtualbox as the virtualization layer, so you can start a vagrant vm using the gui. Add the following to your VagrantFile.

config.vm.boot_mode = :gui

Also take a look at sahara as it lets you treat it more like a sandbox with quick rollbacks, etc.

Organology

personally my problems are with vagrant, starting a gui doesn't really help, vagrant isn't doing what I need to do. – Tevet

Answer 2

I'll echo the other comment here. If you already have a setup that works smoothly make sure you have everyone using the same versions of VirtualBox, Vagrant and the basebox.

As for a UI and more distribution options you might find Wanton of interest: https://github.com/maestrodev/wanton

Contrabandist

Answer 3

The nix package manager is really worth checking out: http://nixos.org/nix

It provides the command nix-shell, which starts a shell based on the file shell.nix, which corresponds to the Vagrantfile in the nix-world. In contrast to Vagrant however there is no costly virtualization involved. What makes the magic happen is the functional approach to package management using cryptographic hashes of the build inputs.

Nonillion

Answer 4

The configuration was updated in v1.1 for GUI mode:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
  v.gui = true
end

From: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/virtualbox/configuration.html

Besides that, I am very happy with the new version, I would give it a try

Unwelcome

The question isn't about having a GUI for your guests. It's about having a GUI to manage your guests, in the way that VirtualBox does. – Midwinter

Answer 5

I'm not sure there is an alternative. Vagrant is a relatively new software. Problems with ssh on Vagrant seems to appear when virtualbox addons version on the VM is different from the Virtualbox version on the host machine, and I'm not sure there is a solution apart from reinstalling correct versions.

edit virtualbox addons are named VirtualBox Guest Additions

Ammann

I assume you're talking about the VirtualBox Guest Additions? It might be clearer to a new user to use its full name. The file name is (depending on version, of course) something like VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.16.iso – Fourdimensional

Yes in fact, I'm talking about VirtualBox Guest Additions. I'll edit my previous comment. – Ammann

An old comment, but possibly useful. There is a plugin called vagrant-vbguest which will check on startup to see if the current version of the guest additions is up to date, and automatically download and compile them if not. – Apian

Answer 6

Add "config.ssh.forward_x11 = true" to your Vagrantfile then you can easily use X-Windows.

Voronezh

Answer 7

I used vagrant in the past and I also switched to a pure docker solution because it was too heavy / difficult to setup / slow to star (that is my personal point of view). I usually build my files with docker compose and when I don't want to do it manually I use stakkr (a lightweight wrapper made in python : https://github.com/edyan/stakkr).

Cheers

Whiffletree

Answer 8

You could use Docker if you don't mind the configuration overhead https://www.docker.com/

Censure

Answer 9

I suggest to use devilbox that using docker as backend

Cheese