Geshan Manandhar has posted a "getting started" guide to getting a LEMP environment up and running (LEMP being Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP) through a Vagrant setup.

A software engineer tells to a colleague in his team "Man, it is working on your machine, but why is it not working on mine?", then they both find out that one has Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with PHP 5.3 and the other software engineer on which the code is working is Ubuntu 14.04 with PHP 5.5 after some investigation. If you have ever faced this or similar problem its high time to switch to a portable and a reproducible virtual development environment shared among all team members. This is a context where Vagrant comes into play.

He introduces Vagrant and some of the problems it can help with for development groups. He includes some of the basic terminology and mentions some of the alternatives, including Docker and some of the Google popularity results comparing the two. Finally, he gets down to creating the Vagrant configuration with the PuPHPet service with screenshots of each step of the way. He wraps up the post with a look at how you can determine if things are working and how to add records to your hosts file to make the machine easier to reference.