Vagrant 1.6

Vagrant 1.6 is now available! This is a new major release building upon Vagrant 1.5 to add new features to improve workflow, expand Vagrant to support more development environment types, and more.

Vagrant 1.6 introduces no breaking backwards compatibilities. There are some configuration options that have changed but they still work and will now just output deprecation warnings.

There are a few major features in Vagrant 1.6. We covered the major features in feature previews leading up to this release. You can find more information by clicking on the feature name below:

• Global Status and Control
• Windows Guests
• Docker-Based Development Environments

You can download Vagrant now or read the complete CHANGELOG. Or, continue reading to get an overview of the new features and improvements in Vagrant 1.6, as well as the direction we're heading for Vagrant 1.7.

»New Features

Vagrant 1.6 has a large number of new features. We spent a month leading up to the release of Vagrant 1.6 previewing each of these features. To learn more about the new features in Vagrant 1.6, please read the preview post for each:

• Global Status and Control - Global Status shows you the status of all created Vagrant environments on your machine. Global Control lets you control any of these created environments from anywhere on your machine.

• Windows Guests - Windows is now a first-class officially supported guest OS for Vagrant, meaning you can now vagrant up development environments running on Windows.

• Docker-Based Development Environments - This allows Vagrant to run development environments within Linux containers powered by Docker, rather than virtual machines.

In addition to the above features we highlighted, Vagrant 1.6 has many more that we didn't have time to cover in dedicated blog posts:

• New command: version - This command not only shows the current Vagrant version, but also queries the latest Vagrant version and tells you if you are out of date. vagrant -v still exists to only show the current version.

• Provisioners can now run 'once' or 'always' - Prior to Vagrant 1.6, provisioners would only run on the first vagrant up. This is still the case, but provisioners can now be configured to run "always" to run on any subsequent vagrant up or vagrant reload as well.

• Vagrantfiles can contain a post-up message - This message will be shown after a vagrant up and can be used to notify the user how the development environment can be accessed and used.

• Boxes can now be compressed with LZMA - LZMA compression can result in much smaller boxes in a lot of cases, and Vagrant can now decompress LZMA-compressed boxes.

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.

»The Future

Vagrant 1.6 continues the trend of Vagrant 1.5 of being a feature-heavy release. With no backwards compatibility issues for Vagrantfiles or plugins, we expect Vagrant 1.6 to become quickly adopted across Vagrant users.

Work on Vagrant 1.7 is already underway. Vagrant 1.7 will have at least one major new feature that has been heavily requested, but for the most part we're focusing on improving existing features for 1.7. The result of this work should be an extremely stable, feature-rich release.

But, Vagrant 1.7 will include a few surprise features that people are going to be very excited about.