Vagrant & VirtualBox: Essential Tools for Web Development

Course details

Welcome to this course where I you will teach how to create a custom development environment that fits your needs with Vagrant and Virtualbox.

My name is Valentine, I am a web developer , I have been working with Vagrant for some years now and I will be leading you through the course.

The problem

Before Vagrant was introduced, the preferred method of developing a web application was either by uploading files to a web server or by manually installing and configuring all the software needed locally on the development machine (usually Apache, MySQL, PHP) or using already packed and ready to use solutions such as XAMPP.

Unfortunately in the recent years the number of technologies used to create web applications has increased dramatically, having multiple relational and nonrelational databases (just to mention PostgreSQL, Redis, Cassandra), different web servers (Apache, Nginix), messaging queues (like RabbitMQ) or search platforms like Solr and much more. Not too mention all the different configurations.

Vagrant has emerged as part of the solution for this problem and together with Virtualbox has become the defacto standard for building local development environments. Now I cannot imagine doing it the "old way" anymore.

If you are currently using PHP, think for a second what it would mean for your current setup to use PHP7 instead of PHP 5.5? How about just editing a configuration file, typing a command and while automation does its work, you grab a cup of coffee and relax?

Benefits

Vagrant brings the development environment setup time to a minimum, increases productivity and introduces the idea of disposable compute resources (similar to the cloud) but for desktop computers by encouraging the use of automation.

Even if your needs are not that complex (yet), you will still benefit from this course, by improving your workflow, learning more about Linux environments and maybe changing the way you see things.

Together we will install all the tools needed, understand their purpose and learn to maintain them but most valuably we will be creating custom configurations which fit you own needs using an online GUI.

The goal of this course is not to make you a Vagrant expert, but to give you enough information in order to feel comfortable working with Vagrant as a web developer. I will also try to keep you engaged with a lot of practical exercises and quizzes.

While this course uses examples with PHP and MySQL running on Linux, the principles explained here will apply to other languages such as Java, Python, Ruby or JavaScript.

Thank You
Feel free to look over the course description and I am looking forward to seeing you inside.