Portable Development Environments

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

I have been enjoying setting up and utilizing my development environments these days. Though that may sound odd to some, it has been that way as I’ve been able to isolate them from my main system, allow them to be cross-platform, and easily reproduce them on other hosts. The most efficient way I’ve found to do this up until now is by utilizing Vagrant. While most of my work has been based on a mixture of Puppet and Bash shell script provisioning, I’m looking forward to utilizing Docker at some point in the future.

Here are some of the ones I have developed:

• Vagrant Node.js
• Vagrant Laravel
• Vagrant WordPress
• Vagrant Erlang

By no means should they be considered a complete development environment, or ready for all projects that are based on what is in the title. They should be a starting point for future work and something to build upon. Additionally they’ve been great for learning a little more about automation. Any comments, ideas, or applicable pull requests are much appreciated. For the most part, the workflow goes like this for initially launching the development environment.

Get the required dependencies:

• Download Vagrant from: http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
• Download VirtualBox and the Extension Pack from: https://www.virtualbox.org/
• Clone the repository and start the virtual machine. The first time will take awhile to boot and subsequent ones will be much quicker. In this example I’m showing the nodejs branch:

$ git clone https://github.com/kherrick/vagrant-environments development
$ cd development
$ git checkout nodejs
$ bin/vm start

• To turn off the virtual machine:

$ bin/vm stop

• To login to the virtual machine:

$ bin/vm ssh