We now have a fully functional virtual machine which can be used for basic web development. We’ve packaged this virtual machine up and we’ve given it to other members of our team. But now let’s say its time to switch gears, maybe work on another project, maybe go out to lunch, or maybe just go home. What do we do to clean up our development environment?
There are three options to clean up your environment:
Each of these options and their pros and cons will be covered below.
One option is to suspend the virtual machine by running vagrant suspend. This will save the current running state of your virtual machine and then stop it. To resume working again at some other time, simply issue a vagrant resume to get going!
The main benefit of this is that resuming your work again is quick, a matter of maybe 10 to 15 seconds. The cost is that your disk space is still consumed by the virtual machine. An average virtual machine takes up about 1 GB of disk space.
Another option is to halt the virtual machine by running vagrant halt. This will attempt a graceful shutdown of your VM (such as issuing a halt in a linux machine) and wait for it to shut down. To resume working again, issue a vagrant up, which will reboot the machine but will not repeat the import sequence (since its already imported).
The main benefit of this is it allows you to cleanly shut down your VM, and allow it from a cold state again. The cost is that you still pay for the disk space that is consumed by the virtual machine.
Finally, you can completely destroy the virtual environment. This can be done by running vagrant destroy which will literally delete all traces of the virtual environment off the disk. To get started again, run vagrant up and your environment will be rebuilt.
The benefit of this is that your disk space is completely restored to pre-VM state, saving you about 1 GB on average. The cost is that you must wait for a full rebuild when you vagrant up again.
Typically you would not destroy the environment of an active project, unless disk space is really at a premium. Instead, most users choose to suspend or halt their projects instead.