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    16 July 2016

    Pro Vagrant

    by Alpha01

    This book can practically turn anyone from a total Vagrant noob to an advance user, no matter if you’re a developer or a sysadmin. More importantly, this book will help you to easily integrate Vagrant to your current development environment. The Vagrant documentation is really good and comprehensive. On the other hand, this book basically holds your hand through the entire process of learning Vagrant, which it’s not a bad thing if you ask me. Depending on your environment, the Vagrant workflow might be fairly complex. This book does a wonderful job explaining Vagrant’s workflow using basic PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, and Python working application examples. https://github.com/pro-vagrant.

    I really liked the chapters on custom box creation and versioning from scratch. If you’re either a sysadmin or a developer and unless you live under a rock, by now you heard of the term “DevOps”. As Vagrant itself being a DevOps tool, this book brilliantly distinguishes what aspects of Vagrant are handled by the sysadmin and what aspects a developer only needs to care about. From creating a box from scratch and versioning it, provisioning, distribution, to using git to integrate a working and distributable vagrant environment. I was however disappointed to see that this book did not described distributing versioned boxes using your own http server.

    Like the book Vagrant: Up and Running, the virtualization platform used throughout the book is VirtualBox.

    I honestly believe Apress should’ve labelled this book as a “Beginning” title and not “Pro”. Extending Vagrant is not even touched on this book, which I think it’s the main reason why it should be called “Beginning Vagrant” instead. As a plugin developer myself, I would love to see an entire book dedicated to extending Vagrant. While the Vagrant documentation is great, it would be awesome and helpful to read of developing practical vagrant plugins from scratch. In the past, their been instances were I had to read through the Vagrant source (RTFS) for action hooks that weren’t even documented. Luckily, now they actually have documentation for them! However other areas such as the Vagrant middleware API, the existing documentation as of this writing is a lot to be desired. I would buy a Pro Vagrant development book in a heart beat.

    In terms of deciding which Vagrant book to recommend, I honestly can’t say which book is better Vagrant: Up and Running or Pro Vagrant. Both are great and well worth reading.

    Rating: 3/5

    Pro Vagrant: Master the Creation and Configuration of Virtual Development Environments

    Tags: [ vagrant ]