What is Vagrant?

Vagrant makes Virtual Machines on your computer

Vagrant is focused on "boxes". A box has a virtual computer in it ("virtual machine," or "VM" for short). Each "box" has an operating system installed on it (We use Ubuntu 14.04), and some programs. Booting up a Vagrant box is essentially similar to booting up any computer, except it is much easier to standardize and control what is on that computer, in terms of software. Also, since the hardware the virtual computer uses is... virtual, we can expect that the hardware will behave consistently, too.

All this makes for a very reliable, reproducible environment to test our software in. (It's also very fast to set up our test environment using Vagrant. It should take roughly an hour to an hour and a half.)

Vagrant is free, open-source software, and so is the main Virtual Machine manager it relies upon, which is VirtualBox.

Special setup for Refuge Restrooms

To see how our Ubuntu box is customized, so as to be ready to test our website, see the main configuration file,

Vagrantfile

and this script that it runs when you type vagrant up:

setup_vagrant.sh

Getting set up with Vagrant

To get started with Vagrant, see: CONTRIBUTING.md

See Also:

• https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/index.html

• https://www.virtualbox.org/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#Ubuntu_14.04_LTS_.28Trusty_Tahr.29