A Virtual Machine for Development using Vagrant

Introduction

This project automates the setup of a development environment. Use this virtual machine to work on a pull request with everything ready to hack and run the test suites.

Requirements

VirtualBox
Vagrant 1.1+ (not a Ruby gem)

How To Build The Virtual Machine

Install Vagrant, which can be downloaded from the Vagrant site, which also provides step-by-step installation instructions.
Build the VM

In the directory you want to work in, enter the following:

$ git clone <URL of this repository>
$ cd <Name of repository>
$ vagrant up

If the base box is not present, vagrant up fetches it first.

After the installation has finished (it can take several minutes), you can access the virtual machine with the following command:

host $ vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-23-generic-pae i686)

host $ refers to the command prompt on your computer's OS, as opposed to the prompt in the virtual machine.

If you're on Windows, you can opt to access the virtual machine using an ssh client such as Putty or Bitvise SSH, with the following parameters:

Host: 127.0.0.1
Port: 2222
Username: vagrant
Password: vagrant

Port 8080 in the host computer is forwarded to port 8080 in the virtual machine. Thus, applications running in the virtual machine can be accessed via localhost:8080 in the host computer.

What's In The Box

Git
RVM
Ruby 2.1.3 (binary RVM install)
Bundler
Postgres
System dependencies for nokogiri and pg
Databases and users needed to run the test suite
Node.js for the asset pipeline
PhantomJS

Recommended Workflow

The recommended workflow is

edit in the host computer (i.e. your physical computer)

and

test within the virtual machine.

This workflow is convenient because in the host computer you normally have your editor of choice fine-tuned, Git configured, and SSH keys in place.

Virtual Machine Management

When done just log out with ^D and suspend the virtual machine

host $ vagrant suspend

then, resume to hack again

host $ vagrant resume

Run

host $ vagrant halt

to shutdown the virtual machine, and

host $ vagrant up

to boot it again.

You can find out the state of a virtual machine anytime by invoking

host $ vagrant status

Finally, to completely wipe the virtual machine from the disk destroying all its contents:

host $ vagrant destroy # DANGER: all is gone

Please check the Vagrant documentation for more information on Vagrant.

ChrisTheDBA / vagrant-dev-box