What is Vagrant used for?

Vagrant is a HashiCorp command line tool that builds and shares portable development environments across VirtualBox, VMware, cloud providers and containers. It is a good fit for reproducible dev environments for teams, testing software across operating systems and onboarding developers with one command.

Is Vagrant open source?

Yes. Vagrant is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at hashicorp/vagrant and is written mainly in Ruby.

Yes. Vagrant is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.

What are some alternatives to Vagrant?

Similar open-source tools in the Developer Tools category include Apprise, assh and LNMP. SaaS products in the same category include Codacy, GoLand and Ona.

Is Vagrant actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Vagrant was on 28 September 2026, and the latest release is v2.4.9, published on 21 August 2025. The project has 27k stars on GitHub.

Vagrant: open-source developer tools

About Vagrant

Vagrant helps teams build and share development environments. A single configuration file describes a machine, and Vagrant creates it consistently on any supported provider, so a whole team can work against identical setups regardless of whether they use Windows, macOS or Linux.

Environments can run on local hypervisors like VirtualBox or VMware, on cloud platforms including AWS or OpenStack, or inside containers such as Docker or plain LXC. The framework provides a configuration format and workflow for creating and managing complete portable environments that can live on a laptop or in the cloud. Vagrant is written in Ruby, and it needs bsdtar and curl on the system PATH.

The repository carries a notice that the separate HCP Vagrant service is being deprecated, effective November 2026, with only limited features remaining in the community edition; the notice states this does not affect the Vagrant CLI. The license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub, so confirm the current terms before using it in a commercial setting.

Key features

Declarative development environment configuration
Works with VirtualBox and VMware
Cloud providers such as AWS and OpenStack
Container providers including Docker and LXC
Portable across Windows, macOS and Linux
Ruby-based command line interface

Good fit for

→Reproducible dev environments for teams
→Testing software across operating systems
→Onboarding developers with one command

Built with: Ruby
Tags: vagrant; virtualization; development-environment; devops; ruby; hashicorp; virtualbox; automation

Vagrant: questions and answers

What is Vagrant used for?: Vagrant is a HashiCorp command line tool that builds and shares portable development environments across VirtualBox, VMware, cloud providers and containers. It is a good fit for reproducible dev environments for teams, testing software across operating systems and onboarding developers with one command.
Is Vagrant open source?: Yes. Vagrant is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at hashicorp/vagrant and is written mainly in Ruby.
Is Vagrant free?: Yes. Vagrant is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
What are some alternatives to Vagrant?: Similar open-source tools in the Developer Tools category include Apprise, assh and LNMP. SaaS products in the same category include Codacy, GoLand and Ona.
Is Vagrant actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Vagrant was on 28 September 2026, and the latest release is v2.4.9, published on 21 August 2025. The project has 27k stars on GitHub.