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Comment by wuunderbar | Hacker News Reader

Vagrant lets you provision in a codified manner full-fledge VMs. This code can be pulled down by your developers to deploy a development environment on their machines. Inside of this you can choose to run containers of your apps with proper tooling built around it.

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This is the best definition I saw posted. The best sales pitch I've seen for Vagrant is that it lets you create a config ("Vagrantfile") from which you can build a virtual machine. Now you, or someone else, can take that vagrant config and recreate the same vm (on multiple platforms btw - virtualbox, kvm, etc) for testing and development.

Can't you do the same thing with docker, docker compose?

No, because containers are processes not vms.

If you've recently migrated your stack to a fully docker containerised setup, docker-compose can be a great replacement for an old vagrant provisioning setup, as the startup time will usually be a fraction of that needed by running vagrant up. It won't make sense for every project, but it's definitely a viable option for some.

The equivalent tool is docker-machine, not docker compose.

Though they de-emphasised that tool in favour of Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows which interact directly with the platform hypervisor to create a Linux VM.

You can get close but as someone else said, they are mean't to be processes. You can get more control with Vagrant for a lot of things and have actual VMs.

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