Vagrant is a tool for managing consistent development environments. While it is not intended for production use, VuFind developers may find it helpful for quickly setting up a VuFind system, and it may also be useful for evaluation purposes.

Starting with VuFind 4.1, the software ships with a default Vagrantfile that will get an instance of VuFind running on an Ubuntu image.

To get started, make sure that Vagrant is installed on your system, then simply go to the VuFind directory and run:

vagrant up

The first time you run this, it will take quite some time to install and set up everything. Once the installation completes, VuFind will be visible on the host machine's port 4567, so you can access it with http://localhost:4567/vufind.

To log into the virtual machine to run commands, you can execute

vagrant ssh

Note that your host machine's VuFind directory will be mounted within the Vagrant SSH session as /vagrant. Any changes you make there will affect your host machine as well (and vice versa).

When you are finished, you can use “vagrant suspend,” “vagrant halt” or “vagrant destroy” depending on how permanently you wish to stop the machine. You can always reactivate it with “vagrant up” again later.

If you are on a version of VuFind older than 4.1, or if you want to explore other options, here are some other VuFind/Vagrant options:

• Mark A. Duffy has contributed a VuFind 2.x Vagrant configuration on this page.
• An alternative, puppet-configured option that runs directly off a clone of the VuFind 2.x git repository

is available here.