Vagrant Repositories

Pack up your boxes and put them in Artifactory

Vagrant has made “but it works on my machine” obsolete. At the same time, it has circumvented the “onboarding hell” that developers went through every time they joined a new team with its own specific environment. Now, all a developer has to do is type vagrant up with the right box, and start coding. A process that, in the past, may have taken a week or more, is now reduced to minutes. But the question remains, what is the right box? A development organization may need many different boxes. Each team may have different requirements for the environment on which their project is being developed. Consequently, an organization needs to maintain and manage hundreds of boxes at a time. While private boxes could be placed on Atlas, enterprises typically require a more secure environment for boxes in which the company’s source code may end up.

Artifactory’s supports Vagrant as a local repository for Vagrant  boxes presenting several benefits:

Distribute and Share boxes within your organization
Using local repositories, Artifactory gives you a central location to store your internal Vagrant boxes. When all teams know that any box can be accessed from a single URL, access to local boxes and managing them between the different teams becomes very easy. And if you need to share your boxes with colleagues in geographically remote sites, Artifactory supports replication to another instance of Artifactory that is outside of your local network.

Secure private boxes with access control
By using a local repository within Artifactory, enterprises can exceed the security offered by private boxes on Atlas and enjoy fine-grained access control to their boxes. As a first line of defense, Artifactory lets you use naming patterns to define “Excludes” and “Includes” for access. Then you can assign different sets of permissions to users and groups. You can even use Artifactory’s integration with LDAP, Active Directory, SAML, Crowd and others to control access to your servers

Reliable and consistent access to boxes
Using Artifactory instead of private boxes on Atlas removes any issues related to internet connectivity. When all of your boxes are accessed through local repositories in Artifactory, connectivity is never a problem.

Smart search for boxes
Artifactory provides you with flexible search capabilities to help you find any Vagrant boxes stored in your system using both the Artifactory UI and the REST API. Built-in functions make common searches very simple. For example, you can easily find the “latest” version of any box without having to specify a version number. But the full power of search with Artifactory comes through custom properties. Artifactory lets you assign any set of properties to your boxes, which can later be used for search. Custom properties let you search for boxes using any set of rules relevant to your workflow.

More than just Vagrant
Artifactory supports most common packaging formats. Whether it’s Docker images, NuGet packages, RubyGems or Vagrant boxes, Artifactory is a single solution that handles all of your binary artifact management.

As a local Vagrant repository, Artifactory offers box management and security features that enterprises need when working with Vagrant.