I use vagrant for all mediawiki and extension development. This is primarily because other environments i've tried do not setup families of language wikis along with commons which I need for CirrusSearch development.

In V24#310, @DLynch wrote:

I have no actual loyalty to vagrant -- I use it because I need the full restbase + parsoid + citoid services-cluster. Last time I tried using our docker setup, multiple parts of those fell over.

In V24#312, @freephile wrote:

I have used MediaWiki-Vagrant but haven't invested enough time to learn how to use it properly. Part of the reason is that I'm not always doing extension development and I haven't contributed to core. At the same time I've been busy trying to develop automated deployment of MediaWiki for production use. cf. QualityBox/Meza

I responded "I tried it but it never worked well", which is not exactly right. I know that different people have different needs and goals for a development environment and I don't mean to criticize Vagrant. I just prefer things to be lightweight and simple. I have a single systemd-nspawn container running all relevant services, which I administer directly. If I want to configure Apache, I just edit the Apache configuration files. That works for me.

If this is meant to compare to MediaWiki-Docker (distributed now with core), then I'd say I'm more inclined to use MediaWiki-Docker because it's more lightweight (using LXC instead of VirtualBox), and because it is probably easier to setup (my estimation) in popular cloud environments like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure. I ran into problems with MediaWiki-Vagrant back in 2015 when I first tried it in earnest on AWS (documented on my wiki at https://wiki.freephile.org/wiki/MediaWiki-Vagrant)

As a tangent to this discussion, I've actually been documenting the various automated deployments of MediaWiki if anyone wants a quick introduction / overview.

For reference, I believe that the only absolute blocker for me being able to use MediaWiki-Docker for development is T259685. There's some tracking on T261390 but the only other known issue was closed recently, so we're very near to it being viable...

(I spun up MediaWiki-Docker and got all the relevant extensions installed and configured today, just to verify, and that remains the stopping point.)

In V24#314, @Catrope wrote:

I use MediaWiki-Vagrant, but only because I'm on Linux and vagrant-lxc is fast. If it wasn't for vagrant-lxc (or in an alternate universe where I was a Mac user), I would probably have switched to Docker by now for performance reasons.

In V24#317, @abi_ wrote:

I use MediaWiki-Vagrant for all extension development. I started using it when MediaWiki Docker was not around, and have continued to use it. I find Vagrant roles easy to use, and like the ability to install additional software inside the Vagrant manually.

That being said, I think I could shift to Docker with a bit of effort.

In V24#319, @Ottomata wrote:

I use MW-Vagrant mostly out of habit, but I do appreciate that it uses Puppet. It allows me to test and develop new Puppet ideas outside of the operations/puppet repository.

In V24#321, @jgleeson wrote:

A few of us in fundraising-tech use MW-vagrant for daily development.

We are also in the early stages of learning and building out a Docker successor which we'll likely move to once complete but that will probably run into next year and until then we'll likely be running MW-vagrant.