How to Create Development Environments with Vagrant and Puppet (Video)

Vagrant is a virtualization tool that lets you create and configure virtualized development environments that are portable, lightweight and reproducible. In other words, with Vagrant you can set up development environments with whatever you need (a Debian or Ubuntu with Apache, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.), and those environments can be cloned or reproduced so that a whole development team can work and program in the same environment on their own machine.

To see an example of how useful Vagrant is, suppose a team of about 4 or 5 people wants to develop a web system (or a website) that will run on a server under Apache, with a MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres or whatever database. This server will be an external server that receives a request and sends back a response (Client-Server):

Imagine that everyone on this team has a different operating system on their computer (a Mac OS, a Debian, an Ubuntu, a Windows, etc.). In that case, each of them would need to install Apache with MySQL and everything else on their computer, just like on the server where the website’s code will be uploaded. Since this can be very tedious and, let’s be honest, those of us who have suffered it know it’s "a real pain", the best thing would be to have a virtual machine cloned on each team member’s computer, with an environment identical to the one on our server where our website will run. We can have that thanks to Vagrant, which lets us configure development environments to test our website before uploading it completely to our server. In short, we could say (even if it’s not technically accurate) that we’re bringing our server into VirtualBox, or similar tools:

 As we always do on this site, let’s see how to configure a development environment with Puppet, in this case to work with PHP and the MySQL and MongoDB databases. To follow along with this video tutorial, you’ll need VirtualBox and Vagrant installed on your computer, both available for all operating systems (Mac OS, Linux and Windows):

Presentation about Vagrant and Puppet by Daniel Acedos: