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  5. Gradle vs Vagrant

Gradle vs Vagrant

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vagrant
Vagrant
Stacks11.9K
Followers7.8K
Votes1.5K
Gradle
Gradle
Stacks24.3K
Followers9.8K
Votes254
GitHub Stars18.1K
Forks5.0K

Gradle vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

What is Gradle? A powerful build system for the JVM. Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

What is Vagrant? A tool for building and distributing development environments. Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Gradle and Vagrant are primarily classified as "Java Build" and "Virtual Machine Management" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Gradle are:

  • Declarative builds and build-by-convention
  • Language for dependency based programming
  • Structure your build

On the other hand, Vagrant provides the following key features:

  • Boxes
  • Up And SSH
  • Synced Folders

"Flexibility" is the primary reason why developers consider Gradle over the competitors, whereas "Development environments" was stated as the key factor in picking Vagrant.

Gradle and Vagrant are both open source tools. Vagrant with 18.6K GitHub stars and 3.74K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Gradle with 9.16K GitHub stars and 2.67K GitHub forks.

Airbnb, Coursera, and Asana are some of the popular companies that use Vagrant, whereas Gradle is used by Netflix, 9GAG, and Intuit. Vagrant has a broader approval, being mentioned in 802 company stacks & 475 developers stacks; compared to Gradle, which is listed in 456 company stacks and 351 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Vagrant
Vagrant
Gradle
Gradle

Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Boxes;Up And SSH;Synced Folders;Provisioning;Networking;Share;Teardown;Rebuild;Providers
Declarative builds and build-by-convention;Language for dependency based programming;Structure your build;Deep API;Gradle scales;Multi-project builds;Many ways to manage your dependencies;Gradle is the first build integration tool
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
18.1K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
5.0K
Stacks
11.9K
Stacks
24.3K
Followers
7.8K
Followers
9.8K
Votes
1.5K
Votes
254
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 352
    Development environments
  • 290
    Simple bootstraping
  • 237
    Free
  • 139
    Boxes
  • 130
    Provisioning
Cons
  • 2
    Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)
  • 2
    Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space
  • 1
    Development environment that kills your battery
Pros
  • 110
    Flexibility
  • 51
    Easy to use
  • 47
    Groovy dsl
  • 22
    Slow build time
  • 10
    Crazy memory leaks
Cons
  • 8
    Inactionnable documentation
  • 6
    It is just the mess of Ant++
  • 4
    Hard to decide: ten or more ways to achieve one goal
  • 2
    Dependency on groovy
  • 2
    Bad Eclipse tooling
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
HP Cloud Compute
HP Cloud Compute
Joyent Cloud
Joyent Cloud
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
SoftLayer
SoftLayer
VirtualBox
VirtualBox
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Vagrant, Gradle?

Apache Maven

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Bazel

Bazel

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

boot2docker

boot2docker

boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, weighs ~27MB and boots in ~5s (YMMV).

Pants

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

Otto

Otto

Otto automatically builds development environments without any configuration; it can detect your project type and has built-in knowledge of industry-standard tools to setup a development environment that is ready to go. When you're ready to deploy, otto builds and manages an infrastructure, sets up servers, builds, and deploys the application.

libvirt

libvirt

It is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies.

JitPack

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.

Buck

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

Apache Ant

Apache Ant

Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.

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