When comparing Vagrant vs PamPam, the Slant community recommends Vagrant for most people. In the question“What are the best Windows web development environment for PHP?” Vagrant is ranked 8th while PamPam is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Vagrant is:
We chose this setup for our professional Drupal development workflow because it gives the most accurate representation of a deployment server, thus minimizing any development faults.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Once correctly configured it is easy to expand the system and add new Projects
We chose this setup for our professional Drupal development workflow because it gives the most accurate representation of a deployment server, thus minimizing any development faults.
Pro Cross-platform portability
Allows to work with coding tools of your choice, on any underlying platform and create portable virtualized soft dev environments that will work equally well on any operating system, be it Windows, MacOS or Linux.
Pro Open source
Pro Run both 32bit and 64bit systems
Because it's text-based and developed by powershell.
Pro Folder structure is clear
Pro Intuitive interface
Because its very focus is on basic features.
Pro Fast to start and stop services in 3-5 seconds
Pro Enable Virtual Host and SSL default
Pro Only a language and lightweight (< 100KB)
Useful to understand and customize it.
Pro Separate your data and server data
You can change dir of your data, make it more portable, save your data safer when you upgrade and move.
Pro Version switching
You can add more package versions, so you can switch between versions.
Pro Text-Based
All files are plain text, so they're understandable and modifiable. You can upgrade and build other versions yourself.
Pro Portable
You can move it around to other locations or machines, and it still runs normally.
Cons
Con If you want to quickly get a PHP Environment going, this is not the best choice
You have to do some distinct editing of settings files in order to make it run the way you want.
Con No built-in packages
You need to manually add zip versions of packages, but you can always update latest version of packages when you want, not depending on the maker of the stack.
Con It's very new so it has some unknown and unpredictable bugs
You can debug and fix it yourself though.
Con No documentation
But it does not take long time to learn to use.
Con Setup process is not too easy for new users
Con Only for Windows
But you can customize it for other OSs.
Con Very basic features
- Change versions of packages
- Change dir your data or server data
- Start or Stop services
- Add virtual host
- Add PHP dir and MariaDB dir to user environment path
Con Very basic stack (Apache, MariaDB, PHP)
Supports not a lot of software out of the box. If you want more, you need to upgrade it yourself. Fortunately, it's all in plain text, so you can.