DEVELOPMENT WITH VAGRANTJohn Coggeshall

John Coggeshall

PHP Core Developer

Freelancer

@coogle

What’s Vagrant?

Vagrant is a tool for managing the creation and management of self-contained development environments.

Think of it as a tool that combines a few different technologies together into one bag of awesome.

What’s Vagrant?

Benefits & Drawbacks of Vagrant

Get people up and running fast

Completely Sandboxed

Consistent Deployment

Version Controlled

Safety Net

Large Upfront investment *

Requires learning new stuff

Takes up a lot of space

Increases complexity

Getting Started

So how do we get started?

1) Download tools2) Define

Environment3) Prosper

Tools you’ll need: Vagrant

http://www.vagrantup.com/

VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.or

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Vagrant Commands

There are many commands to interact with your environment available to you via Vagrant

We will discuss some of them in this talk, but they are fully documented here:

https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/cli/index.html

Useful Vagrant CLI commands

Bring up a VM

$ vagrant up

Power down a VM

$ vagrant halt

Reboot a VM

$ vagrant reload

SSH into a VM

$ vagrant ssh

Destroy / delete a VM

$ vagrant destroy

Vagrant Providers

Vagrant supports a number of different providers (the technology that creates the virtual environment)

For us we’re using the VirtualBox and Amazon EC2 providers as they are “free”

Providers are extendable as plug-ins

A VMWare provider is also available

Getting Started

Once you have the tools the first step in creating your environment is to select a box to use.

Boxes are ready to run virtual machines in a variety of OSes

A large selection of pre-made boxes are available for use:

http://www.vagrantbox.es

Debian

Ubuntu

Windows

BSD

Creating an Environment

Vagrant environments are defined through a file called a VagrantFile.

To create a stub of this file, from the root of your project execute the following command:

$ vagrant init [box name]

$ vagrant box add precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box virtualbox

$ cd /myproject

$ vagrant init precise64

THE VAGRANTFILE

Tools to help build a Vagrantfile

A Vagrantfile as you’ve seen is basically Ruby.

There are also a number of online tools available to help you generate these files using a UI if that’s what you prefer.

Generate your Vagrantfile online

Rove

http://rove.io/

PuPHPet

http://puphpet.com/

Vagrant Provisioners

Provisioners are various tools (extendable as plug-ins) for configuring the virtual environment

Vagrant supports a number of various provisioners out of box, most notably Puppet and Chef

Vagrant Provisioners

• File

• Shell

• Ansible

• CFEngine

• Chef

• Docker

• Puppet

• Salt

Making the Most of Vagrant

There are a number of ways to improve your Vagrant experience at various points that are worth mentioning Streamlining environment creation Improving performance of the

environment Etc.

Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Improving Performance

There are a number of ways to improve the performance of the virtual environment Provider Selection – VMWare does better

than VirtualBox For VMWare there are a few things

you can do as well Use NFS to share the project Use all CPU cores Use ¼ of system memory

Improving Creation Time

There are a number of things you can do to simply the complexity of using a tool like Vagrant to build environments Don’t use provisioners Create skeleton projects

Skipping Provisioners

If you want, you don’t necessarily have to use any provisioners at all when using Vagrant Boot up a box, login, and configure the

environment manually Use vagrant package to create a .box

from your configured VM Provide this to others

Easier, but you lose some visibility and management that you get from provisioners

Creating a Skeleton

IMHO, better than simply packaging boxes is to create a skeleton of your basic projects and build off of them as necessary

I have created said skeleton projects http://github.com/coogle/skeleton

Same speed in ramp-up time without losing the power of the provisioners

THANK YOU!Questions? Please rate my talk: http://joind.in/11664