On my current project I have been setting up a vagrant box to setup specific environment. This contains a bunch of recipes that download around 200MB of data. Large amount of data download can be slow depending on your internet bandwidth. But when that is coupled with compiling and installation of packages locally, it's absolutely unbearable.
In my case, I had something going wrong on the last step of setup, which would mean that my environment wouldn't work as expected. The issue was a tricky one and required vagrant provision rerun as manual steps worked just fine.
So I was left with no choice but to tear down vagrant box repeatedly and build the whole box back from scratch. While thats the purpose of vagrant boxes and Chef, the feedback time of the whole process was driving me nuts.
I am guessing, it must be a common problem for people who frequently work with vagrant to provision large and complicated setups.
If like me you are using Vagrant > version 1.0, then Vagrant-vbox-snapshot is the way to go. All you need to do is
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbox-snapshot
That installed the vagrant plugin. It's uses internal virtual box's capability to take vm snapshots and restore them. Very quick and effective.
With that I ran provisioning script to a point where I was fairly comfortable with the setup. Took a snapshot and restoring it back to that for repeated runs. No data download and no setup time wasted. Here is the command line options that plugin provides you.
