Setting environments on Vagrant?

Question

I'd like to ask some information about Vagrant.

First things first, my PC runs Windows as the main OS, I'm using VirtualBox and I've installed VirtualBox in which I've created a virtual where I've installed Ubuntu and set up my development environement (Ruby-MySQL-Git-Nodejs etc), but I'd like to see whether is better option to switch to Vagrant or keep things as currently are.

Now, regarding Vagrant. From a little research I've done about why using Vagrant most resources say that it gives you the ability to create a virtual development environment same as the production. Also, by installing Vagrant you can set up a virtual Linux environment on every OS either Windows, or Mac or Linux too.

So far so good but my main question is can I use Vagrant for creating multiple development environments? so for example:

1. Have n-different development environments: A for Ruby (Ruby - Rails - Postgres - Git - Nodejs) and B for PHP (PHP-MySQL-Git). So if you try in B the ruby -v or node -v commands they won't be identified as installed in this one.
2. Usually on a development environment there's a folder where we keep all projects, like projects/project-a, projects/project-b, projects/project-c etc etc. Can I have different/separate environements for each project, even if both project-a and project-b are PHP projects? So basically I want to keep them separate and clean from each other to avoid any mess and conflicts.

Answer 1

Yes! I love Vagrant even though it doesn't do much, but it makes it convenient. Just keep a Vagrantfile in each of your project-a... folders and they will be separate machines. You can have ones for Rails, for PHP, etc.

Here are existing ones for Rails: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sort=&provider=&q=rails

For PHP: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sort=&provider=&q=php

To bring up a dev environment (presumably with server), just type

vagrant init leopard/rwtrusty64
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Super simple and reproducible. Check the docs for more. https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile/

Even better, you can install Vagrant and VirtualBox with Chocolatey, just like yum or apt-get or emerge.

chocolatey install virtualbox
chocolatey install vagrant