Provisioning vs Packaging a box with all the necessary tools in Vagrant

Question

I am trying to set up a development environment with Vagrant. I am using centOS 6. From what I have read about Vagrant, I should set up provisioning scripts to install the packages I need when I run vagrant up. For me, this process takes quite a while. However, it seems like it would be more efficient to install everything one and create a new box. Is there some advantage to provisioning that I'm missing? What is it best for me to do in this case?

Answer 1

You can provision everything and when you want to run vagrant up for the nth time you can do so without provisioning: vagrant up --no-provision

As to why provisioning? It's mostly so that you can easily take the base box and then change for example one or more items in the list to see the effect. But it keeps the base clean and reusable.