Should I use Vagrant or Docker for creating an isolated environment

Question

I use Ubuntu for development and deployment and have a need for creating an isolated environment    I am considering either Vagrant or Docker for this purpose  What are the pros and cons  or how do these solutions compare

User · Answer

I preface my reply by admitting I have no experience with Docker, other than as an avid observer of what looks to be a really neat solution that's gaining a lot of traction.

I do have a decent amount of experience with Vagrant and can highly recommend it. It's certainly a more heavyweight solution in terms of it being VM based instead of LXC based. However, I've found a decent laptop (8 GB RAM, i5/i7 CPU) has no trouble running a VM using Vagrant/VirtualBox alongside development tooling.

One of the really great things with Vagrant is the integration with Puppet/Chef/shell scripts for automating configuration. If you're using one of these options to configure your production environment, you can create a development environment which is as close to identical as you're going to get, and this is exactly what you want.

The other great thing with Vagrant is that you can version your Vagrantfile along with your application code. This means that everyone else on your team can share this file and you're guaranteed that everyone is working with the same environment configuration.

Interestingly, Vagrant and Docker may actually be complimentary. Vagrant can be extended to support different virtualization providers, and it may be possible that Docker is one such provider which gets support in the near future. See https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues/404 for recent discussion on the topic.

User · Answer

Vagrant-lxc is a plugin for Vagrant that let s you use LXC to provision Vagrant  It does not have all the features that the default vagrant VM  VirtualBox  has but it should allow you more flexibility than docker containers  There is a video in the link showing its capabilities that is worth watching

User · Answer

Disclaimer  I wrote Vagrant  But because I wrote Vagrant  I spend most of my time living in the DevOps world which includes software like Docker  I work with a lot of companies using Vagrant and many use Docker  and I see how the two interplay   Before I talk too much  a direct answer  in your specific scenario  yourself working alone  working on Linux  using Docker in production   you can stick with Docker alone and simplify things  In many other scenarios  I discuss further   it isn t so easy   It isn t correct to directly compare Vagrant to Docker  In some scenarios  they do overlap  and in the vast majority  they don t  Actually  the more apt comparison would be Vagrant versus something like Boot2Docker  minimal OS that can run Docker   Vagrant is a level above Docker in terms of abstractions  so it isn t a fair comparison in most cases   Vagrant launches things to run apps services for the purpose of development  This can be on VirtualBox  VMware  It can be remote like AWS  OpenStack  Within those  if you use containers  Vagrant doesn t care  and embraces that  it can automatically install  pull down  build  and run Docker containers  for example  With Vagrant 1 6  Vagrant has docker-based development environments  and supports using Docker with the same workflow as Vagrant across Linux  Mac  and Windows  Vagrant doesn t try to replace Docker here  it embraces Docker practices   Docker specifically runs Docker containers  If you re comparing directly to Vagrant  it is specifically a more specific  can only run Docker containers   less flexible  requires Linux or Linux host somewhere  solution  Of course if you re talking about production or CI  there is no comparison to Vagrant  Vagrant doesn t live in these environments  and so Docker should be used    If your organization runs only Docker containers for all their projects and only has developers running on Linux  then okay  Docker could definitely work for you    Otherwise  I don t see a benefit to attempting to use Docker alone  since you lose a lot of what Vagrant has to offer  which have real business productivity benefits    Vagrant can launch VirtualBox  VMware  AWS  OpenStack  etc  machines  It doesn t matter what you need  Vagrant can launch it  If you are using Docker  Vagrant can install Docker on any of these so you can use them for that purpose  Vagrant is a single workflow for all your projects  Or to put another way  it is just one thing people have to learn to run a project whether it is in a Docker container or not  If  for example  in the future  a competitor arises to compete directly with Docker  Vagrant will be able to run that too   Vagrant works on Windows  back to XP   Mac  back to 10 5   and Linux  back to kernel 2 6   In all three cases  the workflow is the same  If you use Docker  Vagrant can launch a machine  VM or remote  that can run Docker on all three of these systems  Vagrant knows how to configure some advanced or non-trivial things like networking and syncing folders  For example  Vagrant knows how to attach a static IP to a machine or forward ports  and the configuration is the same no matter what system you use  VirtualBox  VMware  etc   For synced folders  Vagrant provides multiple mechanisms to get your local files over to the remote machine  VirtualBox shared folders  NFS  rsync  Samba  plugin   etc    If you re using Docker  even Docker with a VM without Vagrant  you would have to manually do this or they would have to reinvent Vagrant in this case  Vagrant 1 6 has first-class support for docker-based development environments  This will not launch a virtual machine on Linux  and will automatically launch a virtual machine on Mac and Windows  The end result is that working with Docker is uniform across all platforms  while Vagrant still handles the tedious details of things such as networking  synced folders  etc    To address specific counter arguments that I ve heard in favor of using Docker instead of Vagrant     It is less moving parts  - Yes  it can be  if you use Docker exclusively for every project  Even then  it is sacrificing flexibility for Docker lock-in  If you ever decide to not use Docker for any project  past  present  or future  then you ll have more moving parts  If you had used Vagrant  you have that one moving part that supports the rest   It is faster   - Once you have the host that can run Linux containers  Docker is definitely faster at running a container than any virtual machine would be to launch  But launching a virtual machine  or remote machine  is a one-time cost  Over the course of the day  most Vagrant users never actually destroy their VM  It is a strange optimization for development environments  In production  where Docker really shines  I understand the need to quickly spin up down containers    I hope now its clear to see that it is very difficult  and I believe not correct  to compare Docker to Vagrant  For dev environments  Vagrant is more abstract  more general  Docker  and the various ways you can make it behave like Vagrant  is a specific use case of Vagrant  ignoring everything else Vagrant has to offer    In conclusion  in highly specific use cases  Docker is certainly a possible replacement for Vagrant  In most use cases  it is not  Vagrant doesn t hinder your usage of Docker  it actually does what it can to make that experience smoother  If you find this isn t true  I m happy to take suggestions to improve things  since a goal of Vagrant is to work equally well with any system   Hope this clears things up

User · Answer

I m the author of Docker   The short answer is that if you want to manage machines  you should use Vagrant  And if you want to build and run applications environments  you should use Docker   Vagrant is a tool for managing virtual machines  Docker is a tool for building and deploying applications by packaging them into lightweight containers  A container can hold pretty much any software component along with its dependencies  executables  libraries  configuration files  etc    and execute it in a guaranteed and repeatable runtime environment  This makes it very easy to build your app once and deploy it anywhere - on your laptop for testing  then on different servers for live deployment  etc   It s a common misconception that you can only use Docker on Linux  That s incorrect  you can also install Docker on Mac  and Windows  When installed on Mac  Docker bundles a tiny Linux VM  25 nbsp MB on disk   which acts as a wrapper for your container  Once installed this is completely transparent  you can use the Docker command-line in exactly the same way  This gives you the best of both worlds  you can test and develop your application using containers  which are very lightweight  easy to test and easy to move around  see for example https   hub docker com for sharing reusable containers with the Docker community   and you don t need to worry about the nitty-gritty details of managing virtual machines  which are just a means to an end anyway   In theory it s possible to use Vagrant as an abstraction layer for Docker  I recommend against this for two reasons    First  Vagrant is not a good abstraction for Docker  Vagrant was designed to manage virtual machines  Docker was designed to manage an application runtime  This means that Docker  by design  can interact with an application in richer ways  and has more information about the application runtime  The primitives in Docker are processes  log streams  environment variables  and network links between components  The primitives in Vagrant are machines  block devices  and ssh keys  Vagrant simply sits lower in the stack  and the only way it can interact with a container is by pretending it s just another kind of machine  that you can  boot  and  log into   So  sure  you can type  vagrant up  with a Docker plugin and something pretty will happen  Is it a substitute for the full breadth of what Docker can do  Try native Docker for a couple days and see for yourself    Second  the lock-in argument   If you use Vagrant as an abstraction  you will not be locked into Docker    From the point of view of Vagrant  which is designed to manage machines  this makes perfect sense  aren t containers just another kind of machine  Just like Amazon EC2 and VMware  we must be careful not to tie our provisioning tools to any particular vendor  This would create lock-in - better to abstract it all away with Vagrant  Except this misses the point of Docker entirely  Docker doesn t provision machines  it wraps your application in a lightweight portable runtime which can be dropped anywhere    What runtime you choose for your application has nothing to do with how you provision your machines  For example it s pretty frequent to deploy applications to machines which are provisioned by someone else  for example an EC2 instance deployed by your system administrator  perhaps using Vagrant   or to bare metal machines which Vagrant can t provision at all  Conversely  you may use Vagrant to provision machines which have nothing to do with developing your application - for example a ready-to-use Windows IIS box or something  Or you may use Vagrant to provision machines for projects which don t use Docker - perhaps they use a combination of rubygems and rvm for dependency management and sandboxing for example   In summary  Vagrant is for managing machines  and Docker is for building and running application environments

User · Answer

Using both is an important part of application delivery testing  I am only beginning to get involved with Docker and thinking very hard about an application team that has terrible complexity in building and delivering its software   Think of a classic Phoenix Project   Continuous Delivery situation   The thinking goes something like this    Take a Java Go application component and build it as a container  note  not sure if the app should be built in the container or built then installed to the container   Deliver the container to a Vagrant VM  Repeat this for all application components   Iterate on the component s  to code against   Continuously test the delivery mechanism to the VM s  managed by Vagrant Sleep well knowing when it is time to deploy the container  that integration testing was occurring on a much more continuous basis than it was before Docker    This seems to be the logical extension of Mitchell s statement that Vagrant is for development combined with Farley Humbles thinking in Continuous Delivery  If I  as a developer  can shrink the feedback loop on integration testing and application delivery  higher quality and better work environments will follow   The fact that as a developer I am constantly and consistently delivering containers to the VM and testing the application more holistically means that production releases will be further simplified    So I see Vagrant evolving as a way of leveraging some of the awesome consequences Docker will have for app deployment

User · Answer

They are very much complementary   I have been using a combination of VirtualBox  Vagrant and Docker for all my projects for several months and have strongly felt the following benefits   In Vagrant you can completely do away with any Chef solo provisioning and all you need your vagrant file to do is prepare a machine that runs a single small shell script that installs docker   This means that my Vagrantfiles for every project are almost identical and very simple   Here is a typical Vagrantfile    - - mode  ruby - -   vi  set ft ruby   VAGRANTFILE API VERSION    2  Vagrant configure VAGRANTFILE API VERSION  do  config    config vm box    mark2    config vm box url    http   cloud-images ubuntu com vagrant trusty current trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant-disk1 box     3000  5000  2345  15672  5672  15674  27017  28017  9200  9300  11211  55674  61614  55672  5671  61613  each do  p      config vm network  forwarded port  guest  p  host  p   end   config vm network  private network  ip   192 168 56 20    config vm synced folder        vagrant    type   gt   nfs    config vm provider  virtualbox do  vb      vb customize   modifyvm    id   --memory    2048       vb customize   modifyvm    id   --cpus    2     end     Bootstrap to Docker   config vm provision  shell  path   script vagrant bootstrap    privileged   gt  true     Build docker containers   config vm provision  shell  path   script vagrant docker build    privileged   gt  true     Start containers     config vm provision  shell  path   script vagrant docker start    privileged   gt  true end   The Bootstrap file that installs docker looks like this     usr bin env bash echo  vagrant  ALL   ALL ALL  NOPASSWD  ALL   gt  gt   etc sudoers apt-get update -y apt-get install htop -y apt-get install linux-image-extra- uname -r  -y apt-key adv --keyserver hkp   keyserver ubuntu com 80 --recv-keys 36A1D7869245C8950F966E92D8576A8BA88D21E9 echo deb http   get docker io ubuntu docker main  gt   etc apt sources list d docker list apt-get update -y apt-get install lxc-docker -y apt-get install curl -y   Now to get all the services I need running I have a docker start script that looks somthing like this     bin bash cd  vagrant echo Starting required service containers export HOST NAME 192 168 56 20   Start MongoDB docker run --name mongodb --detach true --publish 27017 27017 --publish 28017 28017 dockerfile mongodb read -t5 -n1 -r -p  Waiting for mongodb to start     key   Start rabbitmq docker run --name rabbitmq --detach true --publish 5671 5671 --publish 5672 5672 --publish 55672 55672 --publish 15672 15672 --publish 15674 15674 --publish 61613 61613 --env RABBITMQ USER guest --env RABBITMQ PASS guest rabbitmq read -t5 -n1 -r -p  Waiting for rabbitmq to start     key   Start cache docker run --name memcached --detach true --publish 11211 11211  ehazlett memcached read -t5 -n1 -r -p  Waiting for cache to start     key   Start elasticsearch docker run --name elasticsearch --detach true --publish 9200 9200 --publish 9300 9300 dockerfile elasticsearch read -t5 -n1 -r -p  Waiting for elasticsearch to start     key echo  All services started    In this example I am running MongoDB  Elastisearch  RabbitMQ and Memcached  A non-docker Chef solo configuration would be considerably more complicated   A final big plus is gained when you are moving into production  translating the development environment over to an infrastructure of hosts that are all the same in that they just have enough config to run docker means very little work indeed   If you interested I have a more detailed article on the development environment on my own web site at  Implementing A Vagrant   Docker Development Environment

User · Answer

Definitely Docker for the win   As you may know Vagrant is for virtual machine management whereas Docker is for software containers management  If you are not aware of the difference  here is  A software container can share the same machine and kernel with other software containers  Using containers you save money because you don t waste resources on multiple operating systems  kernels   you can pack more software per server keeping a good degree of isolation   Of course is a new discipline to care with its own pitfals and challenges   Go for Docker Swarm if your requirements cross the single machine resources limit

User · Answer

There is a really informative article in the actual Oracle Java magazine about using Docker in combination with Vagrant  and Puppet    Conclusion     Docker   s lightweight containers are faster compared with classic VMs   and have become popular among developers and as part of CD and DevOps   initiatives  If your purpose is isolation  Docker is an excellent choice    Vagrant is a VM manager that enables you to script configurations of   individual VMs as well as do the provisioning  However  it is sill a   VM dependent on VirtualBox  or another VM manager  with relatively   large overhead  It requires you to have a hard drive idle that can be   huge  it takes a lot of RAM  and performance can be suboptimal  Docker   uses kernel cgroups and namespace isolation via LXC  This means that   you are using the same kernel as the host and the same ile system    Vagrant is a level above Docker in terms of abstraction  so they are   not really comparable  Configuration management tools such as Puppet are   widely used for provisioning target environments  Reusing existing   Puppet-based solutions is easy with Docker  You can also slice your   solution  so the infrastructure is provisioned with Puppet  the   middleware  the business application itself  or both are provisioned   with Docker  and Docker is wrapped by Vagrant  With this range of   tools  you can do what   s best for your scenario    How to build  use and orchestrate Docker containers in DevOps http   www javamagazine mozaicreader com JulyAug2015  amp pageSet 34 amp page 0

User · Answer

If your purpose is the isolation  I think Docker is what you want   Vagrant is a virtual machine manager  It allows you to script the virtual machine configuration as well as the provisioning  However  it is still a virtual machine depending on VirtualBox  or others  with a huge overhead  It requires you to have a hard drive file that can be huge  it takes a lot of ram  and performance may be not very good   Docker on the other hand uses kernel cgroup and namespacing via LXC  It means that you are using the same kernel as the host and the same file system  You can use Dockerfile with the docker build command in order to handle the provisioning and configuration of your container  You have an example at docs docker com on how to make your Dockerfile  it is very intuitive   The only reason you could want to use Vagrant is if you need to do BSD  Windows or other non-Linux development on your Ubuntu box  Otherwise  go for Docker

User · Answer

With Vagrant now you can have Docker as a provider  http   docs vagrantup com v2 docker   Docker provider can be used instead of VirtualBox or VMware   Please note that you can also use Docker for provisioning with Vagrant  This is very different than using Docker as a provider  http   docs vagrantup com v2 provisioning docker html  This means you can replace Chef or Puppet with Docker  You can use combinations like Docker as provider  VM  with Chef as provisioner  Or you can use VirtualBox as provider and Docker as provisioner

[vagrant] Should I use Vagrant or Docker for creating an isolated environment?

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