Vagrant or Docker for creating an isolated environment

Question

I use Ubuntu for development and deployment and have a need for creating an isolated environment. I am confused between Vagrant or Docker for this purpose. Can you guys help me out with this? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Vagrant is basically a virtual machine manager. It let’s you script the virtual machine configuration as well as the provisioning. However, it is still a virtual machine depending on VirtualBox with a huge overhead. It requires you to have a hard drive file that can be huge, it takes a lot of ram, and performance may be not very good.

Docker on the other hand uses kernel cgroup and namespacing via LXC. It means that you are using the same kernel as the host and the same file system. You can use Dockerfile with the docker build command in order to handle the provisioning and configuration of your container. You have an example at docker docs on how to make your Dockerfile

The only reason you could want to use Vagrant is if you need to do BSD, Windows or other non-Linux development on your Ubuntu box. Otherwise, go for Docker.