Backend and Infrastructure

Planning Your Virtual Machine Use

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We're keeping this page up as a courtesy to folks who may need to refer to old instructions. We don't plan to update this page.

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Sprout Video

Everyone will use Vagrant a little differently. In this lesson, Emma shares some of her strategies for using Vagrant for her personal developer environment.

Lesson Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to describe how many Vagrant instances you will use, and why.

Lesson Summary

Emma started with one Vagrant instance per project but found that she switches tasks frequently enough that it was a problem--with only 8G RAM, it's hard to have more than one machine running at a time. Although the shut down + startup procedure only takes about five minutes, but it's still dead time. This is especially true as the shut down/start up time doesn't include pulling a fresh copy of the Git repository and updating the database. Emma recommends: grouping your projects with similar requirements into the same Vagrant instance IF you are limited by hardware resources AND you need to switch tasks frequently. Then, as needed, create new vagrant instances if you can justify the split. For example: if you need two different versions of PHP or two different servers (nginx vs. Apache).

Additional resources