Many WordPress developers have adopted Vagrant as part of their toolbox for creating development environments, due to the fact that it’s relatively lightweight and makes collaborative work much easier. Varying Vagrant Vagrants is one of the most popular Vagrant configurations for WordPress, but there are many others out there tailored to different uses, i.e. Chassis, VagrantPress, Salty WordPress, and VIP Quickstart, to name a few.
Vagrant Manager is a new tool for OS X that gives you a UI for managing all of your virtual machines in one place, no matter what kind of Vagrant configuration(s) you have running. Its convenient toolbar gives you access to all your VMs with the ability to execute commands.
Vagrant Manager’s primary features include:
- Indicators for running/halted VM’s: on (green), off (red), suspended (orange)
- Execute vagrant commands: hover over a VM and select a command from the dropdown
- Customization options available through the preferences pane: set preferences for launch, how VMs are displayed, refresh interval, etc.
- Multi-Machine Support: run actions against one machine or all of them at once
Adding Vagrant Manager is actually much easier than setting up a new Vagrant configuration. After you download it, Vagrant Manager automatically detects VirtualBox and Parallels machines. Any vagrant machines that you want it to detect must already be initialized. If you don’t see a machine in the list, simply run vagrant init on it. Machines will disappear from your list once destroyed, so you might want to add a bookmark in Vagrant Manager for quick access later.
The preferences pane lets you select your Terminal preference, change the icon theme for the status bar, launch at login, and show/hide various counts/notifications.
Certainly, you don’t need a UI for managing your VMs, but it gives you a nice visual overview of all your machines in one centralized place. If you’re like me, and you constantly forget which machines you have running, this utility is a convenient addition to your menu bar. Vagrant Manager was released under the MIT License. Download it for free from GitHub.
Thanks for sharing this, I will be checking it out! However, having recently found an Alfred workflow for managing vagrant instances on Packal I suspect I’ll continue using it simply because it doesn’t take up yet more space in my menu bar, and well it’s Alfred and everything Alfred is awesome fast.