What is Vagrant?

While trying to drag a WordPress install into the 21st century for the last week or so, I’ve been working with Vagrant, among other things, to bring parity to a development-vs-production environment. But Vagrant was kind of a black box to me… it worked (and nicely, I might add), but I had no idea how it did what it did, and why exactly I should use it instead of just downloading MAMP.

So, I Googled. Extremely literally: “What is Vagrant?” And one of the first results was what really got my brain to click:

http://24ways.org/2014/what-is-vagrant-and-why-should-i-care/

Instead of rehashing 24 ways’ content, I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to check out the above link to learn more about Vagrant (oh no, my bounce rate!). Truth is, the author Darren Beale groks Vagrant better than my two-week old experience, and the article has a great primer / tutorial on getting started (with downloadable files to boot!).

Sidenote: 24 Ways is a great site with topical UI/UX, front- and back-end developer content, self-described as an “advent calendar for web geeks.” Highly recommended.