When we started using a modern workflow, one that rotated around developing in virtual environments, we rapidly began discovering the downsides. The most obvious case was trying to manage dozens of Vagrant boxes became frustrating very quickly. We had no easy way to see (at a glance) which boxes were running. Similarly our base boxes could not be run simultaneously since their ports would collide. Even worse the design oriented members of the team did not take well to have to fiddle around in terminal every time they switched projects.

Hydra aims to solve these problems by creating a simple web interface to see your boxes and control them. Additionally it modifies your host file for you automatically making the projects available to you simply by going to their custom address. The automatic generation of private ip addresses is aimed at preventing collisions between your boxes so that you can quickly switch between projects. Hydra conceptualizes your development environments as boxes, all of which are interacted with the same way via the web interface. Right now the only types of boxes that are supported of Vagrant boxes provided by Virtual Box (support for other Vagrant providers is coming shortly) and Play! framework environments.

• Mac OSX
• JRE 6+
• Vagrant 1.2+
• Virtual Box

• Download the project here
• Create a folder in your home directory named hydra
• Move some projects that you want to work with from Hydra into that folder
• Goto the folder where you extracted Hydra and double click start
• Open your browser and head to http://localhost:13838
• You should see a list of the projects you moved in
• Enter your password so that Hydra can work with your hosts file

• Max Walker (@ReluctantHipstr) - Developer
• Dan Romlein (@danielromlein) - Made the sick long shadow logo