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Jenkins vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

Introduction

Jenkins and Vagrant are both widely used tools in the software development industry. However, they serve different purposes and have distinct features that set them apart. In this article, we will explore the key differences between Jenkins and Vagrant.

  1. Scalability: Jenkins is primarily a Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) tool that focuses on automating the build, test, and deployment processes. It can seamlessly scale up to handle large-scale software development projects by distributing workloads across multiple servers or agents. On the other hand, Vagrant is a tool for creating and managing lightweight, reproducible development environments. It allows developers to create virtual machines or containers quickly, making it ideal for individual development or small projects.

  2. Automation: Jenkins provides a wide range of plugins and integrations to automate various software development activities, including build, test, and deployment processes. It supports the creation of complex workflows and pipelines, allowing teams to ensure code quality and automate repetitive tasks efficiently. In contrast, Vagrant focuses on automating the setup and configuration of development environments. It uses configuration files to define development environments' characteristics, making it easy to recreate and share environments across different machines.

  3. Scope: Jenkins is designed to support the entire software development lifecycle, from code commit to deployment. It provides features for continuous integration, testing, and delivery, enabling teams to establish robust software development practices. Vagrant, on the other hand, is primarily focused on streamlining the setup and management of development environments. It allows developers to quickly provision and configure software stacks, making it easier to set up consistent development environments across different machines.

  4. Portability: Jenkins is a web-based tool that can be accessed through a browser, making it highly portable and accessible from anywhere. It can be installed on various operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, giving teams the flexibility to choose the environment that suits them best. Vagrant, on the other hand, relies on a command-line interface (CLI) for most operations. While it is available on multiple platforms, its command-line interface can be less intuitive for users who are not familiar with the terminal.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: Jenkins has a large and vibrant community with a vast collection of plugins and integrations developed by the community. This extensive ecosystem enables Jenkins to integrate with various tools and technologies commonly used in the software development process. Vagrant also has an active community, but its ecosystem is more focused on providing pre-configured development environments through Vagrant Boxes. These boxes contain the necessary software and configurations to support specific development stacks.

  6. Use Cases: Due to their different focuses, Jenkins is commonly used in large-scale projects with complex CI/CD requirements. Its ability to scale and support plugins makes it suitable for teams working on software products or services. Vagrant, on the other hand, is often used by individual developers or small teams who want to create consistent development environments quickly. It is especially useful when working with multiple projects or requiring isolated environments for different development stacks.

In summary, Jenkins is a versatile CI/CD tool that supports the entire software development lifecycle and scales well for large projects. Vagrant, on the other hand, is a tool for creating reproducible development environments, making it ideal for individual developers or small teams.

Advice on Jenkins and Vagrant
Needs advice
on
Azure PipelinesAzure Pipelines
and
JenkinsJenkins

We are currently using Azure Pipelines for continous integration. Our applications are developed witn .NET framework. But when we look at the online Jenkins is the most widely used tool for continous integration. Can you please give me the advice which one is best to use for my case Azure pipeline or jenkins.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
GitHubGitHub

If your source code is on GitHub, also take a look at Github actions. https://github.com/features/actions

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Mohammad Hossein Amri
Chief Technology Officer at Planally · | 3 upvotes · 524.3K views
Needs advice
on
GoCDGoCD
and
JenkinsJenkins

I'm open to anything. just want something that break less and doesn't need me to pay for it, and can be hosted on Docker. our scripting language is powershell core. so it's better to support it. also we are building dotnet core in our pipeline, so if they have anything related that helps with the CI would be nice.

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Replies (1)
Ankit Malik
Software Developer at CloudCover · | 1 upvotes · 507K views
Recommends
on
Google Cloud BuildGoogle Cloud Build

Google cloud build can help you. It is hosted on cloud and also provide reasonable free quota.

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Needs advice
on
ConcourseConcourse
and
JenkinsJenkins

I'm planning to setup complete CD-CD setup for spark and python application which we are going to deploy in aws lambda and EMR Cluster. Which tool would be best one to choose. Since my company is trying to adopt to concourse i would like to understand what are the lack of capabilities concourse have . Thanks in advance !

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Replies (1)
Maxi Krone
Cloud Engineer at fme AG · | 2 upvotes · 426.3K views
Recommends
on
ConcourseConcourse

I would definetly recommend Concourse to you, as it is one of the most advanced modern methods of making CI/CD while Jenkins is an old monolithic dinosaur. Concourse itself is cloudnative and containerbased which helps you to build simple, high-performance and scalable CI/CD pipelines. In my opinion, the only lack of skills you have with Concourse is your own knowledge of how to build pipelines and automate things. Technincally there is no lack, i would even say you can extend it way more easily. But as a Con it is more easy to interact with Jenkins if you are only used to UIs. Concourse needs someone which is capable of using CLIs.

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Needs advice
on
JenkinsJenkinsTravis CITravis CI
and
CircleCICircleCI

From a StackShare Community member: "Currently we use Travis CI and have optimized it as much as we can so our builds are fairly quick. Our boss is all about redundancy so we are looking for another solution to fall back on in case Travis goes down and/or jacks prices way up (they were recently acquired). Could someone recommend which CI we should go with and if they have time, an explanation of how they're different?"

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Replies (6)
Dustin Falgout
Senior Developer at Elegant Themes · | 13 upvotes · 581.7K views

We use CircleCI because of the better value it provides in its plans. I'm sure we could have used Travis just as easily but we found CircleCI's pricing to be more reasonable. In the two years since we signed up, the service has improved. CircleCI is always innovating and iterating on their platform. We have been very satisfied.

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Peter Thomas
Distinguished Engineer at Intuit · | 9 upvotes · 896.2K views
Recommends
on
Travis CITravis CI
at

As the maintainer of the Karate DSL open-source project - I found Travis CI very easy to integrate into the GitHub workflow and it has been steady sailing for more than 2 years now ! It works well for Java / Apache Maven projects and we were able to configure it to use the latest Oracle JDK as per our needs. Thanks to the Travis CI team for this service to the open-source community !

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Recommends
on
Google Cloud BuildGoogle Cloud Build

I use Google Cloud Build because it's my first foray into the CICD world(loving it so far), and I wanted to work with something GCP native to avoid giving permissions to other SaaS tools like CircleCI and Travis CI.

I really like it because it's free for the first 120 minutes, and it's one of the few CICD tools that enterprises are open to using since it's contained within GCP.

One of the unique things is that it has the Kaniko cache, which speeds up builds by creating intermediate layers within the docker image vs. pushing the full thing from the start. Helpful when you're installing just a few additional dependencies.

Feel free to checkout an example: Cloudbuild Example

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Recommends
on
Travis CITravis CI

I use Travis CI because of various reasons - 1. Cloud based system so no dedicated server required, and you do not need to administrate it. 2. Easy YAML configuration. 3. Supports Major Programming Languages. 4. Support of build matrix 6. Supports AWS, Azure, Docker, Heroku, Google Cloud, Github Pages, PyPi and lot more. 7. Slack Notifications.

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Oded Arbel
Recommends
on
GitLab CIGitLab CI

You are probably looking at another hosted solution: Jenkins is a good tool but it way too work intensive to be used as just a backup solution.

I have good experience with Circle-CI, Codeship, Drone.io and Travis (as well as problematic experiences with all of them), but my go-to tool is Gitlab CI: simple, powerful and if you have problems with their limitations or pricing, you can always install runners somewhere and use Gitlab just for scheduling and management. Even if you don't host your git repository at Gitlab, you can have Gitlab pull changes automatically from wherever you repo lives.

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Recommends
on
BuildkiteBuildkite

If you are considering Jenkins I would recommend at least checking out Buildkite. The agents are self-hosted (like Jenkins) but the interface is hosted for you. It meshes up some of the things I like about hosted services (pipeline definitions in YAML, managed interface and authentication) with things I like about Jenkins (local customizable agent images, secrets only on own instances, custom agent level scripts, sizing instances to your needs).

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Decisions about Jenkins and Vagrant

Jenkins is a pretty flexible, complete tool. Especially I love the possibility to configure jobs as a code with Jenkins pipelines.

CircleCI is well suited for small projects where the main task is to run continuous integration as quickly as possible. Travis CI is recommended primarily for open-source projects that need to be tested in different environments.

And for something a bit larger I prefer to use Jenkins because it is possible to make serious system configuration thereby different plugins. In Jenkins, I can change almost anything. But if you want to start the CI chain as soon as possible, Jenkins may not be the right choice.

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Pros of Jenkins
Pros of Vagrant
  • 523
    Hosted internally
  • 469
    Free open source
  • 318
    Great to build, deploy or launch anything async
  • 243
    Tons of integrations
  • 211
    Rich set of plugins with good documentation
  • 111
    Has support for build pipelines
  • 68
    Easy setup
  • 66
    It is open-source
  • 53
    Workflow plugin
  • 13
    Configuration as code
  • 12
    Very powerful tool
  • 11
    Many Plugins
  • 10
    Continuous Integration
  • 10
    Great flexibility
  • 9
    Git and Maven integration is better
  • 8
    100% free and open source
  • 7
    Github integration
  • 7
    Slack Integration (plugin)
  • 6
    Easy customisation
  • 6
    Self-hosted GitLab Integration (plugin)
  • 5
    Docker support
  • 5
    Pipeline API
  • 4
    Fast builds
  • 4
    Platform idnependency
  • 4
    Hosted Externally
  • 4
    Excellent docker integration
  • 3
    It`w worked
  • 3
    Customizable
  • 3
    Can be run as a Docker container
  • 3
    It's Everywhere
  • 3
    JOBDSL
  • 3
    AWS Integration
  • 2
    Easily extendable with seamless integration
  • 2
    PHP Support
  • 2
    Build PR Branch Only
  • 2
    NodeJS Support
  • 2
    Ruby/Rails Support
  • 2
    Universal controller
  • 2
    Loose Coupling
  • 352
    Development environments
  • 290
    Simple bootstraping
  • 237
    Free
  • 139
    Boxes
  • 130
    Provisioning
  • 84
    Portable
  • 81
    Synced folders
  • 69
    Reproducible
  • 51
    Ssh
  • 44
    Very flexible
  • 5
    Works well, can be replicated easily with other devs
  • 5
    Easy-to-share, easy-to-version dev configuration
  • 3
    Great
  • 3
    Just works
  • 2
    Quick way to get running
  • 1
    DRY - "Do Not Repeat Yourself"
  • 1
    Container Friendly
  • 1
    What is vagrant?
  • 1
    Good documentation

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Cons of Jenkins
Cons of Vagrant
  • 13
    Workarounds needed for basic requirements
  • 10
    Groovy with cumbersome syntax
  • 8
    Plugins compatibility issues
  • 7
    Lack of support
  • 7
    Limited abilities with declarative pipelines
  • 5
    No YAML syntax
  • 4
    Too tied to plugins versions
  • 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

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What is Jenkins?

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

What is Vagrant?

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.

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What are some alternatives to Jenkins and Vagrant?
TeamCity
TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.
CircleCI
Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.
Travis CI
Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.
Bamboo
Focus on coding and count on Bamboo as your CI and build server! Create multi-stage build plans, set up triggers to start builds upon commits, and assign agents to your critical builds and deployments.
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.
See all alternatives