Vagrant is software for creating and configuring a virtual development environment. It is a wrapper for virtualization software, such as VirtualBox, and configuration management tools such as Chef, Salt and Puppet. Since version 1.1, Vagrant is no longer tied to VirtualBox and also works with other virtualization tools, for example, VMware Workstation, and also supports cloud environments such as Amazon EC2. The tool is written in Ruby; It can be used in projects created in other programming languages, such as PHP, Python, Java, C # and jаvascript. Developers who wish to easily migrate their work to various platforms and environments could be looking for a way to reproduce their work on portable environments.

Vagrant was constructed to offer people with an accessible means to configure and reproduce portable development environments, which can be controlled by a single consistent workflow. This can help maximize productivity and flexibility for the developers and their corresponding development teams.

The utility will isolate dependencies and their configuration and this will be achieved with a single disposable, consistent environment.

One must note however, that the essential tools that are required in development environments, such as editors, browsers or debuggers, will not be excluded from the portable environments.

The application creates so-called “Vagrantfiles”, which once defined, the command “vagrant up” will deploy the developers’ work onto the environment they prefer, in no time.

The main interface presents itself as a command-line based console that offers multiple switches that can be used for controlling the behavior of the application.

One can manage boxes, connect to remotely shared Vagrant environments, stop and delete any traces of a Vagrant environment, pack the currently loaded Vagrant environment into a box and much more.

For those who the initial switches do not suffice their requirements, the command-line based interface can also list all the available commands, by simply inputting the “vagrant list-commands” switch.