[pivotal]

I've had quite the opposite experience. Vagrant has saved my team lots of time fighting environmental issues. The approach of running apache locally falls apart pretty quickly as you add more components to your application. Elastic search, mongo, one person happens to have php 7 instead of 5.2 and wrote everything with short array syntax, etc.

We also work on many different projects, often getting dropped into something new without much of a primer. Being able to "vagrant up" and not having to know all the dependencies to get up and running is very handy.

Do we spend time troubleshooting vagrant weirdness? For sure, but compared to the time saved it's a no-brainer.

[samsonradu]

I tend to agree with the parent comment, a small team can get away without it if the software stack is stable. PHP 5.2 to 7 is quite a change and should have been documented upfront. I assume that the project must conform to certain software requirements. On the other hand, npm is full of surprises.

[pivotal]

I don't disagree that if you can get away with just a local development environment that it is likely easier to get up and running. However, it requires good documentation of project dependencies and discipline by the team to not accidentally upgrade their version of PHP without telling anyone, both things that are easier said than done. Vagrant lets you codify that through "code". In the case of my employer, it's a necessity, but obviously everyone is different.

[samsonradu]

Agreed, but the “Vagrant doesn’t start” saying is a real thing imo. Maybe it’s my experience but it doesn’t feel very robust.