Vagrant (software)

Last updated
Vagrant
Original author(s) Mitchell Hashimoto [1]
Developer(s) HashiCorp (Mitchell Hashimoto and John Bender)
Initial releaseMarch 8, 2010;14 years ago (2010-03-08) [2]
Stable release
2.4.1 [3] / 19 January 2024;3 months ago (19 January 2024)
Repository
Written in Ruby
Operating system Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Microsoft Windows
Available inEnglish
Type Configuration management
License Business Source License 1.1 [4] (source-available)
Website www.vagrantup.com   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Vagrant is a source-available software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments; [5] e.g., for VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, Parallels, and AWS. It tries to simplify the software configuration management of virtualization in order to increase development productivity. Vagrant is written in the Ruby language, but its ecosystem supports development in a few other languages.

Contents

History

Vagrant was first started as a personal side-project by Mitchell Hashimoto in January 2010. The first version of Vagrant was released in March 2010. In October 2010, Engine Yard declared that they were going to sponsor the Vagrant project. The first stable version, Vagrant 1.0, was released in March 2012, exactly two years after the original version was released. In November 2012, Mitchell formed an organization called HashiCorp to support the full-time development of Vagrant; Vagrant remained permissively licensed free software. HashiCorp now works on creating commercial editions and provides professional support and training for Vagrant.[ citation needed ]

Vagrant was originally tied to VirtualBox, but version 1.1 added support for other virtualization software such as VMware and KVM, and for server environments like Amazon EC2. [6] Vagrant is written in Ruby, but it can be used in projects written in other programming languages such as PHP, Python, Java, C#, and JavaScript. [7] [8] Since version 1.6, Vagrant natively supports Docker containers, which in some cases can serve as a substitute for a fully virtualized operating system. [9]

Architecture

Vagrant uses "Provisioners" and "Providers" as building blocks to manage the development environments. Provisioners are tools that allow users to customize the configuration of virtual environments. Puppet and Chef are the two most widely used provisioners in the Vagrant ecosystem (Ansible has been available since at least 2014 [10] ). Providers are the services that Vagrant uses to set up and create virtual environments. Support for VirtualBox, Hyper-V, and Docker virtualization ships with Vagrant, while VMware and AWS are supported via plugins.[ citation needed ]

Vagrant sits on top of virtualization software as a wrapper and helps the developer interact easily with the providers. It automates the configuration of virtual environments using Chef or Puppet, and the user does not have to directly use any other virtualization software. Machine and software requirements are written in a file called "Vagrantfile" to execute necessary steps in order to create a development-ready box. "Box" is a format and an extension (.box) for Vagrant environments that is copied to another machine in order to replicate the same environment. The official Vagrant documentation [11] details the installation, command line usage, and relevant configuration of Vagrant.[ citation needed ]

License change

HashiCorp announced on Aug 10, 2023 that it changed the license of Vagrant from the MIT license to the Business Source License 1.1. [12] [13]

Related Research Articles

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Vyatta is a software-based virtual router, virtual firewall and VPN product for Internet Protocol networks. A free download of Vyatta has been available since March 2006. The system is a specialized Debian-based Linux distribution with networking applications such as Quagga, OpenVPN, and many others. A standardized management console, similar to Juniper JUNOS or Cisco IOS, in addition to a web-based GUI and traditional Linux system commands, provides configuration of the system and applications. In recent versions of Vyatta, web-based management interface is supplied only in the subscription edition. However, all functionality is available through KVM, serial console or SSH/telnet protocols. The software runs on standard x86-64 servers.


This is a comparison of notable free and open-source configuration management software, suitable for tasks like server configuration, orchestration and infrastructure as code typically performed by a system administrator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Puppet (software)</span> Open source configuration management software

Puppet is a software configuration management tool which includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. It is being developed by Puppet Inc., founded by Luke Kanies in 2005. Its primary product, Puppet Enterprise, is a proprietary and closed-source version of its open-source Puppet software. They use Puppet's declarative language to manage stages of the IT infrastructure lifecycle, including the provisioning, patching, configuration, and management of operating system and application components in data centers and cloud infrastructures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library</span> Open-Source virtual appliance library

The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is a free open-source software project which develops a range of Debian-based pre-packaged server software appliances. Turnkey appliances can be deployed as a virtual machine, in cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services or installed in physical computers.

Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.

Progress Chef is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration "recipes". Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company's servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace to automatically provision and configure new machines. Chef contains solutions for both small and large scale systems.

libvirt Management tool

libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenNebula</span> Cloud-computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed infrastructure

OpenNebula is an open source cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous data center, public cloud and edge computing infrastructure resources. OpenNebula manages on-premises and remote virtual infrastructure to build private, public, or hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service and multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure. In early June 2020, OpenNebula announced the release of a new Enterprise Edition for corporate users, along with a Community Edition. OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2. OpenNebula CE comes with free access to patch releases containing critical bug fixes but with no access to the regular EE maintenance releases. Upgrades to the latest minor/major version is only available for CE users with non-commercial deployments or with significant open source contributions to the OpenNebula Community. OpenNebula EE is distributed under a closed-source license and requires a commercial Subscription.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud Foundry</span> Open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service

Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abiquo Enterprise Edition</span>

Abiquo Hybrid Cloud Management Platform is a web-based cloud computing software platform developed by Abiquo. Written entirely in Java, it is used to build, integrate and manage public and private clouds in homogeneous environments. Users can deploy and manage servers, storage system and network and virtual devices. It also supports LDAP integration.

openQRM is a free and open-source cloud-computing management platform for managing heterogeneous data centre infrastructures.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an orchestration service offered by Amazon Web Services for deploying applications which orchestrates various AWS services, including EC2, S3, Simple Notification Service (SNS), CloudWatch, autoscaling, and Elastic Load Balancers. Elastic Beanstalk provides an additional layer of abstraction over the bare server and OS; users instead see a pre-built combination of OS and platform, such as "64bit Amazon Linux 2014.03 v1.1.0 running Ruby 2.0 (Puma)" or "64bit Debian jessie v2.0.7 running Python 3.4 ". Deployment requires a number of components to be defined: an 'application' as a logical container for the project, a 'version' which is a deployable build of the application executable, a 'configuration template' that contains configuration information for both the Beanstalk environment and for the product. Finally an 'environment' combines a 'version' with a 'configuration' and deploys them. Executables themselves are uploaded as archive files to S3 beforehand and the 'version' is just a pointer to this.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VNS3</span>

VNS3 is a software-only virtual appliance that allows users to control access and network topology and secure data in motion across public and private clouds. VNS3 is a virtual router, switch, firewall, protocol re-distributor, and SSL/IPSec VPN concentrator. The Network Virtualization Software creates a customer-controlled overlay network over top of the underlying network backbone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proxmox Virtual Environment</span> Linux distribution for server virtualization

Proxmox Virtual Environment is a virtualisation platform designed for the provisioning of hyper-converged infrastructure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BOSH (software)</span>

BOSH is an open-source software project that offers a toolchain for release engineering, software deployment and application lifecycle management of large-scale distributed services. The toolchain is made up of a server and a command line tool. BOSH is typically used to package, deploy and manage cloud software. While BOSH was initially developed by VMware in 2010 to deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS, it can be used to deploy other software. BOSH is designed to manage the whole lifecycle of large distributed systems.

HashiCorp, Inc. is an American software company with a freemium business model based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides tools and products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run and connect cloud-computing infrastructure. It was founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar. The company name HashiCorp is a portmanteau of co-founder last name Hashimoto and Corp.

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.

Buddy is a web-based and self-hosted continuous integration and delivery software for Git developers that can be used to build, test, and deploy web sites and applications with code from GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. It employs Docker containers with pre-installed languages and frameworks for builds, alongside DevOps, monitoring and notification actions.

References

  1. ↑ Marvin, Rob (2015-02-26). "Mitchell Hashimoto is automating the world". Software Development Times. Software Development Times. Retrieved 27 June 2016.
  2. ↑ "mitchellh/vagrant: Release v0.1.0". GitHub. Retrieved 6 September 2015.
  3. ↑ "Release 2.4.1". 19 January 2024. Retrieved 20 February 2024.
  4. ↑ "vagrant/LICENSE at main · hashicorp/vagrant". GitHub.
  5. ↑ "Introducing Vagrant | Linux Journal". www.linuxjournal.com. Retrieved 2016-09-14.
  6. ↑ Mitchell Hashimoto (2013). Vagrant: Up and Running (PDF). O'Reilly Media. p. 13. ISBN   978-1449335830.
  7. ↑ "Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from Ruby" . Retrieved May 14, 2012.
  8. ↑ "Vagrant - Getting Started - Project Setup" . Retrieved Jan 19, 2016.
  9. ↑ Mitchell Hashimoto (2014-05-06). "Vagrant 1.6". Archived from the original on 2018-07-10. Retrieved 2020-02-23.
  10. ↑ Brett, Adam (2014-09-23). "Vagrant & Ansible Quickstart Tutorial". adamcod.es. Retrieved 2017-08-06.
  11. ↑ "Documentation". Vagrant by HashiCorp. Retrieved 2021-03-27.
  12. ↑ "HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch".
  13. ↑ "HashiCorp adopts Business Source License".
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