Vagrant4scientists

Scientific software soon gets very complicated to install because packages build on numerous other packages, some of which may be hard to compile and link successfully on a system. Those who frequently need to make sure their target audience (consisting typically of students, collaborators, or customers) has a certain set of packages installed on their system, run into a serious problem when few in the target audience have the competence, interest, and patience to install all the packages on their computer with its particular version of the operating system.

There are many working solutions to this problem:

• Long technical installation descriptions that in practice require considerable experience with compiling and linking software packages.
• Ready-made, easy-to-install files for particular platforms, e.g., Debian packages (.deb files) for Linux systems like Ubuntu, .dmg bundles for Mac, or .exe files for Windows. It can still be quite some work for a user to install the right combination of many packages, although each package gets installed by a double click.
• Virtual machines, such as VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMWare Fusion, can run a particular operating system and thereby take advantage of the most easy-to-use platform from an installation perspective. In particular, one can run Ubuntu or other Debian-based Linux systems and use the apt-get install and pip install commands to make installation of packages and their dependencies trivial.

A Vagrant machine is essentially a wrapper around VirtualBox which makes it very easy to build, distribute, and use a virtual machine. The present document describes how to create and operate a Vagrant machine. The target audience of the document is scientists who wants to spend a minimum of efforts on offering or using a complete computing environment with much sophisticated, hard-to-install mathematical software.

By host we mean the operating system used to build or run a Vagrant machine. Operating system commands issued on the host have a prompt Terminal> while commands issued in the Vagrant machine feature the prompt Machine>.

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