About Vagrant Boxes
Boxes are the package format for Vagrant environments. A box can be used on any Vagrant-supported platform to bring up an identical working environment across a development team.
Vagrant Box Creation and Versioning
Boxes support versioning so that members of your team using Vagrant can update the underlying box easily, and the people who create boxes can push fixes and communicate these fixes efficiently.
Vagrant Cloud makes it easy to manage the versioning of boxes. Versioning boxes in Vagrant Cloud allows for easy updates, transparent fixes, and clear communication in changes made. Learn more about the box release lifecycle here.
Vagrant Box Catalog and Discovery
Vagrant Cloud hosts a catalog of publicly available Vagrant Boxes. These are boxes created by both HashiCorp and community contributions. You can find an owner of a box by selecting their username in the URL or on the box page.
Public Vagrant boxes let you get up-and-running quickly in unfamiliar environments. This is a popular way to set a base development environment launchable in a single command within an organization or community.