[siliconc0w]

Vagrant just allows you to automate setting up virtualbox and running chef inside a vm. You can do the same pretty trivially yourself but why bother when vagrant works.

Where vagrant kinda sucks is when you're using libraries + 'smart' IDEs. I.e you develop locally in eclipse with a maven repo on the VM, or you develop in a python IDE like pycharm with the virtual environment running on the vm. You either have to share 'em from one to the other (which is slow and pretty problematic) or try to keep them in sync (which is also slow and defeats some of the benefit of the automagic dev environment).

IMO, developers benefit from setting up and understanding how their environments work. Make it quick and easy but don't hide it behind an abstraction layer.

[Lazare]

Although I agree in general, PyCharm has recently been adding explicit support for Vagrant and virtualenv in their latest betas, and it works pretty well.

Basically does what you'd hope. I've got Django installed inside a virtualenv inside a linux Vagrant VM, and PyCharm running on the host OS is able to start a Django server, do interactive debugging, autocomplete function names, install new packages to the virtualenv, etc, etc. It's really just like you'd hope, and in my view just as good as PyCharm pointed at a "native" python/django install running on the host OS directly.