Running Tableau on Vagrant
A while back, I got interested in learning more about Tableau for data visualization. Tableau is a data visual analytics platform that allows users to make use of most of their data. You can check out this short video on the numerous things you can do with tableau.
Tableau, however, has only desktop versions for mac and windows which is a bummer for Linux users. As a Linux user, I had to figure out a way of running tableau desktop on my machine without changing my OS and that is where Vagrant comes in.
Vagrant is a tool that allows you to create and configure development environments easily(Check out my article on vagrant here). I prefer vagrant because I have a better understanding of it and configuring the Virtualbox GUI is much easier.
To start, you will need to initialize vagrant by installing a box. A box is an image you need to be installed. Since tableau runs on windows or mac, we may want to download one of the two distributions. I downloaded the Microsoft/EdgeOnWindows10 box which created a basic vagrant file that looked like so:
Then run vagrant up to start the environment and VirtualBox being the provider, will start a windows environment based on the box
You can then download tableau from browser search. I used the default edge browser that comes with windows.
Once you have downloaded it, run the executable file and that’s it! You have tableau desktop version running on your machine.
Note: Tableau has 14days free trial, you might want to take advantage of that before it ends.
