Vagrant combined with Virtual box and a provisioning tool like chef or puppet fundamentally changes the way PHP software developers setup their development environments and develop their web applications. Once configured, vagrant allows developers to spin up a new environment in a couple of commands and allows each developer to have the exact same development environment.
As PHP developers, our development environments differ significantly. Vagrant solves this by allowing developers to create reproducibly development environments on the fly when and where they are needed. Yes, it is true there are now at least half a dozen LAMP installers out there, each one has slight variations on what and how it installs and how it works on different operating systems. Some developers don’t use an installer they might decide to compile from source, use what comes with the latest mac osx or develop directly on a server in the cloud. However, the eco-system around PHP is forever changing and setting up reproducible complex development environments in an automated way is extremely useful. My talk will cover vagrant in detail and enough around virtual box and chef to get developers going so that they can use these tools in their everyday development environments. These tools and skills are a great asset for all PHP developers.
Video producer: http://phpconference.co.uk/
Slides of the presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/jeremyq/the-future-of-the-php-development-environment