On any project, whether you’re a themer, site builder or developer you will need a local development environment to work in. Even if everyone on a project works on the same OS, chances are people will have different versions of Apache MySQL and PHP, different server configuration and not to mention that the local environment will differ from staging and production environments.

This is where Vagrant can help. Vagrant is an open source setup and configuration tool for virtual machines such as VirtualBox or VMWare (and now with Docker support).

In this post, I give a quick overview of how Vagrant and VM's can improve your developer workflow and consistency.