Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.3.0 Released with Support for MailCatcher and More Virtualization Providers

Over the weekend, Jeremy Felt released Varying Vagrant Vagrants 1.3.0. Although VVV uses VirtualBox as its default virtualization provider, this release adds support for Parallels, VMWare Fusion, VMWare Workstation, and Hyper-V in the default Vagrantfile.

Version 1.3.0 also adds MailCatcher to the default provisioning. When working in a development environment, you generally don’t want want to deliver emails from the test site. MailCatcher collects any mail that is sent out and stores it for display. It’s available in the browser at vvv.dev:1080 in case you need to troubleshoot WordPress core and/or plugins.

Felt, the project’s current maintainer, said that he is aiming to push out more incremental releases every three months and hopes to get more developers using the develop branch on GitHub.

“A tough thing about marking version numbers on a project like VVV is that all of the various versions of included packages change frequently,” Felt said. “We need to do a better job of making it easier to maintain existing packages.”

Felt is currently soliciting feedback on changing the TLD for test sites in the next version, as Google is attempting to gain control of the .dev TLD. If the company were to open it up for public registration, it could cause confusion with test sites. After a brief discussion with VVV users, Felt has narrowed the considerations to .localhost, .test, and .local.

In addition to a new TLD for test sites, Felt hopes to update packages on vagrant provision in a future release, which should help keep PHP, Nginx, and MySQL updated. He also wants to make it easy to remove the default configurations for WordPress local, trunk, and dev environments that are offered with VVV out of the box.

For more details on the 23 features and bug fixes in 1.3.0, check out the official changelog.