Discover why Vagrant is a must-have tool for thousands of developers and ops engineers. This hands-on guide shows you how to use this open source software to build a virtual machine for any purpose--including a completely sandboxed, fully provisioned development environment right on your desktop.

Vagrant creator Mitchell Hashimoto shows you how to share a virtual machine image with members of your team, set up a separate virtualization for each project, and package virtual machines for use by others. This book covers the V1 (1.0.x) configuration syntax running on top of a V2 (1.1+) core, the most stable configuration format running on the latest core.

• Build a simple virtual machine with just two commands and no configuration
• Create a development environment that closely resembles production
• Automate software installation and management with shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet
• Set up a network interface to access your virtual machine from any computer
• Use your own editor and browser to develop and test your applications
• Test complicated multi-machine clusters with a single Vagrantfile
• Change Vagrant's default operating system to match your production OS
• Extend Vagrant features with plugins, including components you build yourself