Jay Fallon

 

Vagrant is a Ruby-based tool for building and deploying virtualized development environments. It uses Oracle's open-source VirtualBox virtualization system along with the Chef configuration management engine along with lots of Ruby goodness to automate the creation and provisioning of virtual machines for development purposes.

If you thought rolling out new VMs using Amazon EC2 was easy, Vagrant brings an even simpler system to your local development machine. From the command line, starting is as easy as:

sudo gem install vagrant
vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/base.box
mkdir vagrant
vagrant init
vagrant up

Be warned, though - as a 370MB download, adding that box image isn't a quick process! Once you've got it though, you can keep rolling out VMs based on it at will.

Note that VirtualBox is a separate dependency for Vagrant. Vagrant does not come with VirtualBox built in or anything like that. Download VirtualBox for your OS if you want to try Vagrant.

Beyond the basics of getting a VM running, Vagrant can take care of port forwarding, distribution, environment setup, SSH access, shared folders and, importantly, the provisioning of software onto the VM using Chef. If you want to automatically roll out a VM with Apache 2, Rails, Phusion Passenger, or the like, Chef and Vagrant will take care of it for you. This is powerful stuff!

In terms of documentation and having a straight forward official homepage, Vagrant sets a solid benchmark. There's a straightforward guide to getting started with Vagrant, lots of documentation, and a 12 minute getting started video/screencast. Great work guys!

Still working on a solution for poor aimers, rug peers and assorted outdoorsy types.

Data Monday: Mobile Social Networking

November 2, 2009by Luke Wroblewski

In her keynote on Internet Trends (PDF), Mary Meeker forecast that next generation social networking mobile platforms will drive unprecedented change in communications and commerce. The current growth of mobile social networking seems to support her thesis.

• The second-most popular Web activity for mobile users to engage in on a daily basis is accessing a "social networking site or blog." Last January saw 1.8-million do this, with a monumental, 427-percent increase to 9.3-million people in January 2009. (source)
• Four of the top ten domains accessed via mobile devices are social networking sites. (source)
• In September 2009, there was a one-year increase of 179% in subscribers accessing social networking sites from their mobile devices while those same sites only saw a 10% increase on the PC versions of the sites. (source)
• Mixi’s (Japan’s leading social network) mobile monthly page views are three times desktop page views. (source)
• Irish mobile-phone users spend on average 45 minutes a day accessing social-networking sites via their mobiles (source)
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users. (source)
• 25% of Internet users with mobile or wireless access, use Twitter or another micro-blogging service. (source)
• Almost 40 percent of Internet users with four or more Internet-connected devices use Twitter. The fewer the gadgets, the less a user is likely to connect via a microblog or status updating service. (source)

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