Why Vagrant?

[Alejandro Arroyave]

Hello,I have a doubt: 

Why Vagrant instead of Docker?

I'm checking Docker and in Linux/Unix OS has more benefits, at least with Docker, a layer is removed. In Windows OS don't there is benefits because is the same that Vagrant.

Are there intention to a Docker implementation in a future?

Thanks for read me. 

[Oli Griffiths]

Hi Alejandro

Thanks for reaching out, let me try and clarify the difference and reason for using vagrant.

Vagrant and docker are very different technologies. Vagrant relies on virtualisation technology in order to create an entirely virtual machine running on existing hardware, and is largely OS agnostic. Docker however is a process isolation technology that shares its kernel with the Linux kernel of the host machine. For this reason docker can only run natively on Linux and requires an additional virtualisation layer to work on windows and mac.

Additionally, Docker is designed to run a single process in a single container, whereas vagrant is designed to emulate an entire OS and has multiple processes. As we want to provide a fully functioning system, vagrant makes sense for this. For this reason, distributing a pre-packaged environment is simpler with vagrant than it is with Docker.

I don't know if there are any plans to release a docker equivalent in the furniture, as this tech is intended for development and not production. You are welcome to develop your own docker implementation of course, this can work alongside vagrant.

I hope this answers your question.

Oli Griffiths

[Johan Janssens]

First of the Joomlatools Vagrant Box is intended as a local development environment on Mac (and on Windows). Our team exclusively uses Mac at Joomlatools. We don't develop on Unix/Linux so Docker would offer not much of a benefit to us. We need to boot up Vagrant on Mac anyway to run Docker. 

To add to that. We started with Vagrant years ago, long before Docker become "hot". We haven't had a need to evolve to Docker as Vagrant solves our problem quite nicely (as Oli explained in more detail).

Our Joomlatools developer tools are things we use ay Joomlatools and we make freely available to the community. We don't have a need for Docker and also no time at the moment to build a solution just because we can. If anyone is interested to do so we are most happy to offer our help, or if you want you can sponsor our team to build this. 

Happy coding!

Johan