HashiCorp Vagrant Reviews & Insights

Score10 out of 10

40 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HashiCorp Vagrant are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Decentralized tool with flexibility: Users consistently praise Vagrant as a decentralized tool that allows them to create container packages for starting projects. This feature provides the flexibility needed to work with different styles of WordPress installs or even create custom environments, enhancing their overall development experience.

Easy configuration for local development: Reviewers appreciate Vagrant's ability to easily set ports and URLs for local development. This convenient feature enables them to seamlessly work on their projects without encountering any issues, such as SQL problems, which they may face when using other tools like MAMP or DesktopServer.

Efficiency and repeatability in development: Many users highlight the efficiency of Vagrant in scaffolding a development and test environment. They consistently achieve repeatable results, ensuring that their projects are built on a solid foundation. Additionally, this efficient workflow saves time and effort during the development process.

HashiCorp Vagrant Reviews

14 Reviews

Vagrant: Repeatability and Matching Environments at the Cost of Training and Disk Bloat

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

February 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Vagrant exclusively to test web development projects internally. Our development team uses our proprietary Vagrant configs and boxes which mimic our staging and production environments to quickly scaffold a web project for speedy local development and testing. Our usage targets mostly php projects which require MAMP-type environments, such as Wordpress, though we've also used Vagrant for bespoke, bundled or framework websites.

Pros

Extremely efficient project scaffolding of a dev/test environment
Repeatable results (for the most part).
Great variety of community boxes and plugins
Free

Cons

Major updates have introduced bugs with consequences in our dev projects
Syntax updates have major repercussions for plugin compatibility
Community support is a lengthy process

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend this tool to a colleague looking to create a repeatably deployable local dev environment based on their staging and production environments. I would recommend this mostly for individuals or teams requiring environments with server-side software such as php, et al. There are likely less processor-heavy and smaller tools for simpler projects.

Brendon Brown

Front End Developer / Marketing Technologist in Information Technology at Island City Media (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

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Vagrant - a must have to integrate with Chef

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my organization, Vagrant is used to managing VMs using VirtualBox and Chef Client as the provisioner. This allows users to automatically install software, change configurations and all of the lifecycle used to deploy later on production, without any additional concerns during the process of development, since is a VM-controlled environment.

Pros

Contained development environments on VMs, but with same structure as production environments
Open-source
Huge community
Easy to set up

Cons

It was great if Vagrant consumes less resources than what consumes today

Likelihood to Recommend

Vagrant is well suited to be integrated with Chef, in order to execute configured code on one or more platforms in isolation. Associating Vagrant as a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow, we get an entire group of tools that are a must-have when an organization has lots of platforms that can share some configuration.

Verified User

Professional in Engineering (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Vagrant is great for Drupal Dev, but I prefer Lando

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vagrant is used to create virtual machines for our Drupal servers locally so we can develop on Macs and not have issues when our servers are running Linux. It helps make sure there are no errors building a slightly different package of code, which could easily happen on a Mac.

Pros

Speed vs other VMs
Documentation
Robust, older than many VMs

Cons

Not as fast as natively running Linux
Occasionally I've had to kill instances to start new ones
Can be more confusing to set up (especially auth) compared to native Linux

Likelihood to Recommend

Vagrant is well suited for a team that needs a VM so that only a couple engineers can worry about the environment setup and others can focus on the code. I would give it an eight, but I had a slightly easier experience with lando. Vagrant, however, is older and more widespread, so it could have more features I didn't need.

Josh Stapp

Sr. Software Engineer in Engineering at ICF Next (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

Good tool with minor issues for users on Windows machines.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 13, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Vagrant to provision development environments for web developers.

Pros

Consistent, reliable virtual environments for web development
Easy to use commands

Cons

Lacks a GUI, would be useful for entry level users
Uses lots of resources on old machines
Compatibility issues with some operating systems (Windows 8.1 home, Windows 10 home)

Likelihood to Recommend

You can easily create, share and provision development environments across platforms, excepto if you are on Windows...

Hernán Silva

Senior Front-end developer in Engineering at Velocity Partners (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Great for us!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Vagrant across our Product Dev teams (QA, Front end/Back end Dev, IT Operations, etc) to test our code changes, debug and preview changes made. Vagrant has been a good local way for individuals to work on their code base before making any changes to our stage or production code.

Pros

Local ability to see and test code changes
Can be customized on per user basis

Cons

Can be a complicated setup process depending on your code
Long setup, especially on Windows machines

Likelihood to Recommend

Vagrant is well suited for anyone technical department that does Development and needs to thoroughly test your code, see changes and preview features. Vagrant can give the ability for users to build their own test box to be able to accomplish all of this. In our experiencing the setup and tweaking to get to a workable state has been a bit of a task but now that we have it all done its a super useful tool.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Vagrant is a great, free way to develop for the web locally

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 13, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Vagrant to run virtual machines for local development of our web applications. Each team across our department uses it, but with various configurations. Vagrant allows us to test our applications locally using the same operating system and software configurations as our production servers, so we are able to get a better idea of how things will work once deployed.

Pros

Free
Local testing
Allows use of the same OS and software as the server
Pretty fast and reliable

Cons

Can be difficult to set up
Requires command line usage, which can be difficult for less tech savvy designers/developers
Can take up a lot of disk space if running several VMs with various configurations

Likelihood to Recommend

Vagrant works well for the local development of any website or web application. It shouldn't be very difficult to set up for someone comfortable with Unix and command line usage. It's great for those wanting to get local development as close as possible to the production environment.

It's less appropriate for more design focused developers who are not super comfortable with the command line. Though once set up and configured, it's pretty easy to teach anyone how to use it.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Vagrant gives the flexibility and stability local development needs

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 28, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I switched to vagrant from DesktopServer for my local development stack when updating to High Sierra. Vagrant is a much more versatile and robust product that gives me flexibility and automation. I use it to spin up Wordpress websites locally and give them a local domain. DesktopServer only allowed 3 instances, but with Vagrant I can use as many as I need.

Pros

Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.

Cons

The learning curve is steep for deploying a vagrant package if you've never dealt the command line.
Initially, it was a little difficult to get the networking right because I didn't have a lot of experience with using to the virtual machine.

Likelihood to Recommend

Vagrant is great if you are working on websites or applications locally and need to set up a container that manages the environment. I'm no longer struck with having to work only in one version of a language as well. I can debug locally with an old project in PHP 5.3 or work on a new project that uses PHP 7

Collin Berg

Freelance Web Developer at SJI Associates | Design & Advertising (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Let Vagrant do the repetitive work for you

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

August 16, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used by software developers to create virtual machines where the software that is being developed can be deployed, executed and tested. Also used by consultants to create test or development environments where other products that are delivered to customers can be configured and proven to work as they are needed before putting them in production environments.

Pros

Easy to create machines with different OS's, list of them can be found from Vagrant's website with configuration details.
Flexible configuration, user can determine what software will be pre-installed to machine. Saves time because it doesn't need to be done manually every time.
Easily manage full environments, not just single machines, with single command.

Cons

There's no GUI. Everything has to be configured by text editor and all operations are done through command line.
If there's a problem when bringing up the machine, Vagrant may take lot of time by just waiting and not giving good error output.
I don't like its configuration syntax (Ruby).

Likelihood to Recommend

It saves lot of time by making new machine deployments quick and easy. Only one person has to write and upkeep the configuration files and everyone else can then use them without knowing how to modify them. All they need to do is to install Vagrant and type one command to create the machines so whole team doesn't need to be trained on how to configure Vagrant. However Vagrant creates full virtual machines so it needs a powerful host computer and it always takes a while to bring them up.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Develop Efficiently - Wherever You Need To

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 10, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vagrant provides a framework and automation tools to deploy virtual machines for local development of many sites and applications. This allows safer development and testing, and can be more efficient with the use of local resources and 0 network latency. In tandem with other tools, such as version control and deployment tools, Vagrant is a popular part of many development tool-sets.

Pros

Automation of virtual machine management tasks
Configuration of local development environment
Documentation

Cons

Support minimal - technical expertise required

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a technical expert or if a pre-built box or configuration wizard can meet your needs, Vagrant is a great fit. Even an expert could find it time-consuming to start with Vagrant and related technologies from scratch, so starting from a pre-built environment is highly recommended. Finding an appropriate box will be more or less common depending on your technology stack. LAMP is common as are many Node stacks.

Chris Putnam

Senior Web Developer in Engineering at WebpageFX (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

A must have in every developer's toolkit

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

February 21, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vagrant is used for local development of websites, APIs and web applications. By being able to mimic the production server environment we're able to eliminate the potential for any compatibility issues that can occur when running the code on a different architecture than it was originally built on. It's also helpful in the reverse-- Vagrant ensures that every developer is using the exact same environment.

Pros

Server Virtualization - it's easy to recreate a server environment and automate builds for other developers.
Seamless integration between the server environment and local machine. This allows you to use your preferred editor, automation tools and other applications, but have the website run in a self-contained environment
Community

Cons

Learning curve is steep - It can be challenging for someone to set up initially. After some coaching, the basics come pretty quickly though.
Relies on external Virtual Machine applications - It would be great if Vagrant itself could run the virtual machine instead of leaning on other virtualization software. This is a small detail, but would make setup simple.
Better support for running

Likelihood to Recommend

Extremely useful, but can get a little complicated to maintain several environments. If you only work on one or a handful of sites Vagrant is awesome. If you have dozens to maintain it gets a little more cumbersome. If ensuring compatibility is a must have it's a no-brainer and excellent for sandboxing projects.

Joey Yax

Web Developer in Engineering at Grady Britton (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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