Vagrant 1.5 and Vagrant Cloud

Vagrant 1.5 is now available! This is a new major release that adds some incredible new features to Vagrant. We've also obsessed over stability, so we expect this to be the most stable release, as well.

We're also announcing Vagrant Cloud, a place for sharing, discovering, and creating Vagrant environments. Vagrant Cloud today is a place for managing boxes and Vagrant Share. In the future, it'll continue to grow into a much broader vision we have.

Vagrant 1.5 introduces no breaking backwards compatibilities. There are some configuration options that have changed but they still work and will now just output deprecation warnings. They'll be removed in a future release.

There are a huge number of features in Vagrant 1.5, more than any other release Vagrant has ever had. And there are also a huge number of bug fixes in Vagrant 1.5. The feature highlights:

• Vagrant Share
• Boxes 2.0
• Rsync Synced Folders
• Hyper-V
• SMB Synced Folders

You can download Vagrant now or read the complete CHANGELOG. You can also sign up for Vagrant Cloud now. Otherwise, continue reading for more details about Vagrant 1.5 and Vagrant Cloud.

»New Features

Vagrant 1.5 is full of many new features. We spent almost a month leading up to the release of Vagrant 1.5 previewing each of these features. To learn more about the new features in Vagrant 1.5, please read the preview post for each:

• Vagrant Share - Share access to your Vagrant environment to anyone in the world with a simple command. Collaboration with Vagrant environments has never been easier.

• Boxes 2.0 - Versioned boxes make it easier to track changes, and box names are now as simple as hashicorp/precise64. In short: boxes are much more pleasant to use.

• Rsync Synced Folders - Use rsync to sync folders between the host and the guest. This creates very high performance file writes/reads in exchange for slightly higher syncing times. In addition, rsync synced folders allow filesystem notification systems (such as inotify) to work properly.

• SMB Synced Folders - A high-performance synced folder option for Windows users. These synced folders use SMB to sync data to and from the guest.

• Hyper-V - The first provider other than VirtualBox to ship with Vagrant itself. Vagrant can now create and manage Vagrant environments backed by Hyper-V. This is the first of many providers coming into Vagrant core.

In addition to the above features we highlighted, Vagrant 1.5 has many more that we didn't have time to cover in dedicated blog posts:

• Password-based SSH authentication - Boxes used with Vagrant no longer need to have the "insecure Vagrant key" inside them. Vagrant can now connect with password-based authentication and insert a key for you. This lets you use almost any off-the-shelf virtual machine with Vagrant.

• Plugin management overhaul - Vagrant now has better dependency resolution for plugins, can constrain versions, can update all plugins with a single vagrant plugin update, and more. The command-line usage of the plugin system is the same, but we think that plugins will be much more enjoyable to use and manage now.

• New guest support: Funtoo, NetBSD, and TinyCore Linux - Vagrant can now manage networks, hostnames, etc. on these operating systems as guests.

The documentation for Vagrant has been updated to cover all of these new features, so you can learn details about each feature in the Vagrant documentation.

In addition to these features, dozens of improvements and bug fixes were made to Vagrant. You can see these by reading the complete CHANGELOG.

»Vagrant Cloud

Alongside Vagrant 1.5, we're announcing the availability of Vagrant Cloud. Vagrant Cloud is a hosted service for finding boxes, sharing boxes, managing Vagrant Share, and much more to come.

With the Vagrant Cloud launch, we're featuring Chef's pre-built boxes for various operating systems. These boxes do not have any provisioners pre-installed and are a great starting point for any development environments. They also show how easy it is to find boxes on Vagrant Cloud: https://vagrantcloud.com/discover/featured.

Coming very soon to Vagrant Cloud: support for organizations, API access, audit logs and statistics for box usage, ACLs on Vagrant Shares, custom domains, and more.

Vagrant Cloud is completely free for now. While we'll eventually charge for some access to it, most personal usage will likely remain free. Our current plans for pricing revolve around commercial use and advanced features.

»The Future

Vagrant 1.5 addresses and resolves many major feature requests for core Vagrant functionality. We've already begun work on Vagrant 1.6, which will add a few new exciting core features, as well as bring in more providers into the core of Vagrant.

In 1.6, you'll finally be able to see the status of all created Vagrant environments from anywhere on your system. No more forgetting you have a handful of virtual machines running! Vagrant will also have full support for Windows-based guest machines, finally. And we're planning on adding at least two providers to core, if not more.

Of course, we have more plans than just this, but this should show you that we still have much to do, but we're getting there.