vagrant is a tool to create and configure reproducible development environments. Wat?!
Using virtual machines as your development environment has got multiple benefits: When you're a developer it's easy to provide every team member with the same environment. When your a designer you don't have the hassle of setting up the workspace and can focus on the design instead. When you're done and want to deploy your software you can use the same process you used to setup your virtual machines to provision your production system.
Sounds dope. Where can I get some?
Download the vagrant version for your system and install it. On Ubuntu that's
sudo dpkg -i vagrant_1.5.4_x86_64.deb
Eventually you have to install the virtualbox packages, too. Enter
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
That's it. Now you're ready to setup your first virtual machine. Keep calm, I will guide you:
vagrant init hashicorp/precise32
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
Easy, heh? We just downloaded an Ubuntu precise image, created a so called
Vagrantfile, booted the
machine and connected to it. Halt the machine by disconnecting from the ssh
session and entering vagrant halt.