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Vagrant

A tool for building and managing virtual machine environments.

Vagrant scripts the creation of consistent development environments in virtual machines or containers. A Vagrantfile in the project's repository declares the base image, networking, shared folders, and provisioning steps; running "vagrant up" brings the environment online and "vagrant ssh" drops into it.

The same Vagrantfile works across providers — VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V, libvirt/KVM, Docker, and AWS — which lets a development team standardise on a single Linux toolchain even when laptops run macOS, Windows, and Linux. Provisioners support shell scripts, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, and Docker Compose for configuring the VM after boot.

Mitchell Hashimoto started Vagrant in 2010 as a personal project and went on to co-found HashiCorp around it. Vagrant's licence shifted from MPL-2.0 to BSL-1.1 in 2023 alongside the rest of HashiCorp's tooling; the Hashibis-OpenTofu equivalent for Vagrant has not (yet) emerged at the same scale. Vagrant remains heavily used in cross-platform development teams and in courses and books that need to ship a reproducible Linux environment to students.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install vagrant
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install vagrant
Arch:          sudo pacman -S vagrant
macOS:         brew install vagrant