Introduction Virtual Gemstone creates a fully functioning VirtualBox virtual machine that runs smalltalk in the Gemstone Object Oriented Database proxied behind Nginx, a high performance easy configuration webserver. The nginx installation is configured to use ssl by default, because we care about a secure browsing experience for our users, and we want to use the same configuration in development as in production. Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com) and veewee are used to generate a fresh 'box' from a debian iso. Installation git clone https://github.com/<repository>/virtual-gemstone.git =create a vagrant base box using veewee:= cd virtual-gemstone/veewee vagrant basebox build 'gemstone' run integration specs: vagrant basebox validate gemstone create a .box file in the current directory, for reuse or export to other users: vagrant basebox export gemstone add the box to the list of boxes on the current machine, so you can vagrant box init from it later: vagrant box add 'gemstone' 'gemstone.box' check that it exists: vagrant box list Now you have a running box. Next step is to populate your newly created box. Just do cd virtual-gemstone/vagrant vagrant up If you want to know the details please visit http://vagrantup.com test it: log in to the box vagrant ssh use the text browser in the box to see the site (todo, nginx recipe not completed yet). lynx http://localhost or as soon as SSL is in place: lynx https://localhost How it works Virtual Gemstone is built on Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com), a command line interface that lets you create, destroy VMs at will, and run Chef configuration management scripts We use veewee to generate the vagrant vm from a standard ubuntu 11.04 LTS VM, so you can be 100% sure where your VM comes from, and you can configure it as you wish. Credits