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V for Vagrant

Aug 2, 2015
3 minute read

If you are a web developer, an operations engineer or a designer then vagrant is your best friend. You write code that works on your machine but when it goes on production something went wrong.

###Why this shit happens???

Your teammates are using mac osx, windows, linux having different versions of all dependancies. So there are lots of chances of breaking code on any of the machine. Sometimes your code doesn’t work on production may be because you have different version of database than production or may be your local machine have different operating system than production or there may be lots of scenarios.

Solution

Vagrant is a very useful tool that helps you to create development environment as same as production. It allows you to work from your favourite operating sytem but runs code in the operating system that is used on production or any other. It also helps to run instance on AWS or rackspace and can stop after your testing is done in single command.

Installation

You will need Virtualbox and then Vagrant.

Now choose the box from ATLAS. This box is nothing but your operating system where you want to run your code. It is JeOS(just enough operation system). It is ~200mb depending on what box you choose.
Now, from terminal goto your project directory and run

$ vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64

This will create vagrant file which is configuration file.
The ubuntu/trusty64 is the box name from ATLAS which is nothing but ubuntu 64 bit. You can automate a process of installation of all softwares which is required for your project.
Following is a sample shell script file named as setup.sh in same directory to install postgresql, redis, git and nginx.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
apt-get update
apt-get install -y postgresql-9.1
wget http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-2.8.9.tar.gz
tar xzf redis-2.8.9.tar.gz
cd redis-2.8.9
make
make install
cd utils
./install_server.sh
apt-get install -y git
apt-get install -y nginx
service nginx start

Add path of your shell script and forward port

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.provision :shell, path: "setup.sh"
  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 4567
...

And run

$ vagrant up --provider virtualbox

It will download OS ( if you are firing this command very first time), boots ubuntu and install dependancies.

Port forwarding means niginx is running on port 80 inside VM and you can access it on port 4567 on host.

Goto browser and hit http://localhost:4567

It will o/p something like this

Welcome to nginx!

Hurrey!. You are done.

Using vagrant you can change files from your host machine using your favourite IDE and that changes will reflect inside VM because vagrant shares your project folder where you have initiated vagrant.

Some Useful commands

You can login to your VM and play

$ vagrant ssh

Shutdown VM

$ vagrant halt

Remove box from machine

$ vagrant destroy

References