Vagrants speciality is spinning up and down development environments on developer machines, and it supports a wide variety of what the vagrant documentation calls ‘providers’, but what the rest of us would call hypervisors i.e. It’s hosted on Github for those who are curious about the source code. Vagrant is an open-source tool written in Ruby and maintained by Hashicorp that orchestrates and provisions Virtual Machines on a local machine. I also have been meaning to use Vagrant to more rigorously manage my environments for a while now. I thought to myself that Arch Linux’s spartan approach to built-in packages and its culture of user configuration might be the perfect solution to reducing bloat for my development environments. I keep a separate repository of Ansible scripts for maintaining my suite of configuration. I typically keep two separate spreadsheets to keep track of my VMs, and virtual networks. Also manually managing the different VMs, configurations, external snapshots, and virtual networks is extremely painful. Although I am sensitive to being wasteful of disk space, space is relatively cheap and I don’t have so many projects going on that I am at risk of running out of it. There is a concern about the limitations of space on my laptop with each VM taking up to tens of gigabytes of space when snapshots are taken into consideration. There are a few different frustrations of doing my work this way. I typically will run my VM directly in a KVM machine, using the standard libvirt utilities in Linux to manage it, I also typically will manually manage any virtual networks. If there is a need for a more complex configuration, I will spin up a VM running another Linux distro, usually Fedora, or CentOS. I normally do my work directly in my local machine for simple applications where the code does not have much complexity (which I’ll be honest is the vast majority of the code I write). I decided I wanted to try and improve my development workflow on my home Debian laptops using Vagrant with Arch Linux.

Vagrant arch virtualbox