Perl controls VirtualBox

Virtual Vagabond

Article from Issue 151/2013

Author(s): MIke Schilli

The Vagrant package provides easy management of virtual machines with VirtualBox as the hypervisor on the command line. Provisioning tools like Puppet let customers try out products in pre-installed environments.

The old excuse for broken products – “Well, it works for me!” – should have become obsolete among software developers, at the latest, with the invention of virtual machines.

On a bare-metal, virtual distribution, you can easily install any software suite in a reproducible way to discover whether or not the entire system will work for the customer in the future. To automate this testing, the developer needs a command-line tool to boot the virtual machine, a setup tool to install the application packages and their dependencies, and a script to launch the test suite. Often applications span multiple instances – such as a client that contacts a web server, which in turn uses a database instance.

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