54 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: default
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title: FAQ
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---
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<h1 class="top">FAQ</h1>
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### Why should I use Vagrant? What I'm doing now works just fine.
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One could say that web development was working just fine prior to
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the rise of MVC and opinionated development frameworks and they would
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be speaking the truth as well. Vagrant is not trying to change the way
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you work because its wrong, per se, but move web development forward
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by providing isolated environments which are easy to build, portable,
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and lightweight. For more specific reasons, check out the "[Why Vagrant?](/docs/getting-started/why.html)" page.
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### Could you perhaps convert a Vagrant project into an EC2 instance for deployment?
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That's where Chef comes in. Vagrant uses [Chef](http://www.opscode.com/chef)
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for provisioning VMs. It's basically software configuration management (same category
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as cfengine or Puppet) -- you write cookbooks that specify how a system should be set
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up. If you write your Chef configuration the right way you can take the same set of
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Chef cookbooks you write and deploy to EC2 or any other Linux box, virtual or not.
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So with Vagrant you can essentially pass around a virtual machine configuration amongst
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your team and be confident that the entire team is coding and testing in a near-exact
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replica of the production environment. Then when you're ready to deploy to production,
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you should be able to share the same cookbooks and set up the same environment
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for production as well.
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### Vagrant would be so much better if it had feature `X`!
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Vagrant is open source and released under a permissive [license](/license.html),
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so feel free to modify it and add the feature! Open up a ticket
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explaining why the feature adds value to Vagrant with a link to the
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patch you'd like us to merge in and we probably will. If you aren't comfortable
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adding the feature yourself, still make a ticket and if its compelling
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enough, someone will add it in for you.
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### Don't virtual machines slow down your main development machine?
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The short answer: no. Longer answer: Given a big enough and busy enough virtual machine... perhaps. But through real-world
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usage, we've found that most virtual machines are small, using 256 to 500 MB or RAM,
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and typically are running mostly idle processes. Its not as if the virtual machines
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are running 3D games (although I suppose you could try it)!
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### Virtual machines take up way too much hard drive space!
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An average virtual machine that Vagrant provisions is about 500 MB of physical
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disk space total (although the virtual drive had a capacity
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of 40 GB). Sure, if you have 10 vagrant projects with their virtual environments built,
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this is 5 GB, but its still only 5 GB. And don't forget that Vagrant allows you to complete
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tear down the environment and rebuild it in a flash, so you shouldn't ever even need all
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those environments built at the same time. Just run `vagrant up` when you need a virtual
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machine and disk space will be kept low. |