I was a heavy Vagrant user many years ago, but I thought the project was mostly dead due to changes in business model or focus from HasiCorp, IIRC, and of course, the popularity of Docker.
Also, isn’t Vagrant dependent on VirtualBox? Because the latter doesn’t run on ARM Macs.
I used Vagrant and VMs heavily for customer projects between 2013-2016.
Added benefit was mainly some sort of workspace isolation since you could simply “vagrant in” you different projects via WebStorm/PHPstorm in parallel.
I was given a MacBook Pro 13” with then massive 16gb exactly for this reason: to handle VMs via Vagrant.
Before that, everything was kind of tricky and fragile, mostly relying on a LAMP stack without isolation.
What kind of sucks about ARM Macs is that the pretty darn good x86 emulation seems to be hidden behind a proprietary wall, at least as far as I know.
It sure would be nice if Apple provided a nice interface into their emulation for various projects like VirtualBox / Bochs / PCem / Qemu / DOSBOX / VMWare / Bochs / WINE to plug into.
It also kind of sucks that the entire overall body of PC / DOS / Windows / x86 emulation and virtualization is locked in all these silos despite the open source nature. The problem probably is that there are so many gotchas to document and cross-annotate across the projects that it basically is impossible without some dedicated team of very talented technical documenters.
You can do it, Asahi Linux has access to a binary blob of Rosetta, or something like this, IIRC.
The thing is I don’t really care. I was worried I’d need to run Windows or Linux X86. Turns out, I don’t. I only had to run Windows once for a few moments in the last 3 years since I had an Apple Silicon. Surprising, actually.
Added a footnote suggesting a workaround with Parallels for any confused ARM Mac users out there, searching desparately for this fabled Virtualbox program. Appreciate the catch.
I like Multipass because it does actually work pretty well, but its purpose is to run Ubuntu VMs:
> Ubuntu VMs on demand for any workstation
Which may be suitable for many Linux-based tutorials, but not necessarily all. For instance, we deploy software to RHEL (historical reasons more than anything else) at work and might want a RHEL-based tutorial for things unique to administrating it versus administrating Ubuntu or other distributions.
Also, isn’t Vagrant dependent on VirtualBox? Because the latter doesn’t run on ARM Macs.