Perl controls VirtualBox
Virtual Vagabond
The Vagrant package provides easy management of virtual machines with VirtualBox as the hypervisor on the command line. Provisioning tools like Puppet let customers try out products in pre-installed environments.
The old excuse for broken products – "Well, it works for me!" – should have become obsolete among software developers, at the latest, with the invention of virtual machines.
On a bare-metal, virtual distribution, you can easily install any software suite in a reproducible way to discover whether or not the entire system will work for the customer in the future. To automate this testing, the developer needs a command-line tool to boot the virtual machine, a setup tool to install the application packages and their dependencies, and a script to launch the test suite. Often applications span multiple instances – such as a client that contacts a web server, which in turn uses a database instance.
Busy Vagrant
The Vagrant tool [2] defines the virtual machines used in a software project by means of a configuration file, which the development team can version and manage in the project repository alongside the source code. As its virtualizer, Vagrant uses the free (as in beer) VirtualBox [3], which runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows (Figure 1) and virtualizes even more operating systems as guests. Vagrant sets up the VMs in boxes so they run an SSH daemon and have a user named vagrant with sudo privileges (Figure 2).
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