Vagrant was fantastic pre-Docker and is still arguably more useful for certain cases, but I recall having issues running it last I tried. Based on the website, VirtualBox still lacks stable ARM64 support. Would "boxes" downloaded from the Vagrant cloud need to be built for ARM64 as well, or does it emulate?

It does not emulate. My org has been deprecating Vagrant ever since IT started issuing Apple Silicon as an option. Replacement is Docker Compose, or cloud VMs for software with heavy disk I/O.

Is there such a significant problem with disk IO going to docker for Mac over vagrant?

Now there is overhead for mounting local volumes into the container, but I’ve found them to be negligible on my Apple Silicon Mac’s in the last year or 2. (Apple seems to have been the one to fix it with their new virtualization framework which docker for Mac supports).

Now back when they first added their APFS file system things were atrociously slow when it came to Disk IO (as in 10x slowdowns or more) and there were various workarounds but it seems resolved to me now.

Do you know if Packer is still decent for building cloud AMIs? Or do you have any suggestion for building custom images that can run on cloud platforms as well as locally?

We use packer to build our images for all of Vagrant, Docker and AMIs (multi-arch) and push to the relevant registries. The packer side is probably ~100 lines of HCL, and allows us to have consistent images no matter where it's running. It's a fairly simple tool in premise and does what's on the tin, would recommend.

We're mostly using multi-arch container images for that use case.

Although it's the most common option, VirtualBox isn't the only supported hypervisor [1]. Maybe it will work with another one.

[1] https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/docs/providers

I've been using devenv for new projects. I like it so far. Some might find nix (which it requires) to be overkill, but I think that's underestimating how devilish of a problem it's solving.

devbox is a similar idea, but is more approachable for those who don't know nix.

It seems more approachable than going down the NixOS rabbit hole.

I haven't had a need to reach for it yet, but I will probably try it out at some point.

I'd be cautious about thinking that you'll be able to use it for complex projects without eventually needing to enter the NixOS rabbit hole. This hasn't happened to me yet on a project that I'm using devnenv with, but while using nix flakes I've found weirdness in nipkgs that I wanted to address.

On the other hand, the ability to put non python deps in a place that feels like a venv... feels pretty magical.

Yes for Python it seems to sit between a blurry midpoint of "just use Poetry!" and "just use a container!", but I can see it potentially being useful for a batteries-included devenv in more niche applications like Julia, Elixir, microcontrollers/development boards, etc.

Vagrant was the reason for Hashicorp :-)

Too bad they abandoned it.

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/CHANGELOG.m... ?

The changelog lists both improvements and bug fixes and there's even apparently some effort to port it away from ruby: https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/internal/cl...

Kinda sort nix?