Tag: DevOps

Installing Vagrant

In this series, I’ll demonstrate some of the web development tools I use. Today we’ll cover Vagrant — a virtual environment management tool.

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity, and makes the “works on my machine” excuse a relic of the past.

If you are a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment, without sacrificing any of the tools you are used to working with (editors, browsers, debuggers, etc.). Once you or someone else creates a single Vagrantfile, you just need to vagrant up and everything is installed and configured for you to work. Other members of your team create their development environments from the same configuration, so whether you are working on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, all your team members are running code in the same environment, against the same dependencies, all configured the same way. Say goodbye to “works on my machine” bugs.

 

Let’s get into how to setup Vagrant by HashiCorp:

  1. First, make sure you have your virtualization software installed. For this example, we’re running Oracle’s VirtualBox as it’s an excellent and easy to use open source option. See my VirtualBox Installation Guide here.
  2. Find the appropriate package for your system and download it.
  3. Run the installer for your system. The installer will automatically add vagrant to your system path so that it is available in terminals.
  4. Verify that it is installed by running the command vagrant from the command line – it should run without error, and simply output the options available. If you receive an error, please try logging out and logging back into your system (this is particularly necessary sometimes for Windows).

That’s it, you’re all set. Now go ahead and take a look at my Introduction to ScotchBox which is a great web development option, which uses a vagrantbox.

 

Footnote: It’s also worth mentioning that recently Docker has gained a lot of attention and for some web developers its a great option. I’ve only looked into it a bit, and will probably create a series using that tool later this year.

 

Version Disclosure: This document was written while the current version of vagrant is 2.2.4 and virtualbox is 6.0.4 – different versions might be slightly different.

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Installing Virtual Box

In this series, I’ll demonstrate some of the web development tools I use. Today we’ll cover VirtualBox — an Open Source Virtualization product for your local machine.

Oracle VM VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox, and Innotek VirtualBox) is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor for x86 computers and is under development by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox may be installed on a number of host operating systems, including Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and OpenSolaris. There are also ports to FreeBSD and Genode.  It supports the creation and management of guest virtual machines running versions and derivations of Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, Haiku, OSx86 and others, and limited virtualization of macOS guests on Apple hardware.

In general, our application for web development is to emulate our production web server environment which is often a LAMP or WIMP stack. For our examples in this series, we’re going to look at the most popular, the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

 

The installation and setup of VirtualBox are very simple:

  1. Verify that you have a supported host operating system – that is, the desktop operating system that you’re on right now. https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#hostossupport
  2. Navigate to https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and download the version that is right for your host operating system.
  3. Host OS Specific Steps:
    1. For Windows installations double-click on the downloaded executable file. Select either all or partial component installation – for web development make sure the network components are also selected — USB and Python support is optional
    2. For Mac installations double-click on the downloaded dmg file. And follow the prompts.
    3. For Linux – see this link: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#install-linux-host

For most people that is just about it, you’re installed and all set with VirtualBox. The next step for most web developers will be to install Vagrant, which makes managing virtual images super easy!

 

In some situations, your host machines BIOS settings need to be changed because your manufacturer has turned off the required settings by default. You don’t need to worry about this unless you get an error when trying to use a virtual machine. You might get a message like:

  • VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system
  • This host supports Intel VT-x, but Intel VT-x is disabled
  • The processor on this computer is not compatible with Hyper-V

This issue is can occur regardless of the virtualization technology you use (VMWare, XenServer, Hyper-V, etc).

How to configure Intel-VT or AMD-V:

  1. Reboot the computer and open the system’s BIOS menu. Depending on the manufacturer, this is done by pressing the delete key, the F1 key or the F2 key.
  2. Open the Processor submenu (also may be listed under CPI, Chipset, or Configuration)
  3. Enable Virtualization, Intel-VT, or AMD-V. You may also see Virtualization Extensions,  Vanderpool, Intel VTd, AMD IOMMU, if the options are available.
  4. Select Save & Exit.

You should be now all set, reboot into your host operating system and try again.

Version Disclosure: This document was written while the current version of virtual box is 6.0.4 – different versions might be slightly different.

 

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Scotch Box – Dead simple Web Development

EDIT: March 2020 – Scotch Box is no longer actively maintained so please take a look at the following post which described how to use Cognac Box which is currently maintained release.

In this series, I’ll demonstrate some of the web development tools I use. Today we’ll cover Scotch Box — a virtual development environment for your local machine.

Many people begin development by working directly on live, production web servers. Sometimes they’ll work in a sub-directory or a different URL. However, there are several drawbacks to this approach.

  1. Performance: Every update of your files requires them to be sent over the internet, and equally your tests also need to come back over the internet. While each of these is probably only an extra second of latency for each file, it can quickly add up over the lifetime of development.
  2. Security: Let’s face it, development code isn’t the most secure out of the gate. I recently was developing a custom framework and in the process of writing the code for the display of images, introduced a bug which would dump any file to the browser, even php code or environment variables.
  3. Debugging: Debugging tools such as Xdebug shouldn’t be installed on production servers as it can accidentally expose sensitive data.
  4. Connectivity: You must be connected to the internet to develop, so internet connection, no development.

So for most of my projects, I develop first on my laptop. But instead of installing a full LAMP stack on my desktop (where I’ve got a database and web server running full time in the background), I use a Virtual Machine through Oracles Free VirtualBox Hypervisor.  And instead of having one virtual machine host multiple projects, which might have different development needs (specific PHP versions, databases, etc), I spin up a new virtual instance for each project. This is made super easy through a tool called Vagrant. As they say:

Development Environments Made Easy

This post assumed you already have both Oracles VirtualBox and Vagrant installed on your local machine.

My favorite development stack is Scotch Box — perhaps this is because I love scotch, but more likely because it’s (in their own words): THE PERFECT AND DEAD SIMPLE LAMP/LEMP STACK FOR LOCAL DEVELOPMENT

It’s three simple command line entries and you get access to:

  • Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) OS
  • Apache Web Server
  • PHP v7.0
  • Databases: MySql, PostgresSQL, MongoDB, SQLite
  • NoSQL/Cache: MemCashed, Redis
  • Local Email Testing: MailHog
  • Python v2.7
  • Node.js
  • Go
  • Ruby
  • Vim
  • Git
  • Beanstalkd
  • And much more.
As of March 2020 - this tech static is very outdated, 
for the most recent and long term supported stack, be sure to 
checkout the Cognac Box (replacement for SoctchBox)

Within PHP it includes tools like Composer, PHPUnit, WP-CLI. Also since this is designed for development PHP Errors are turned on by default. It works with most frameworks outside of the box, with the exception of Laravel which needs just a bit of tweaking. All major CMS are supposed like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

And if you want access to more updated versions, such as PHP 7.2 or Ubuntu 17.10.x, you can pay just $15 for their pro version which comes with so much more!

So how to do install it?

  • From the command line, go to your desired root directory, such as Documents
  • git clone https://github.com/scotch–io/scotch–box my–project
  • cd my–project
  • vagrant up                    (learn how to install vagrant)

You can replace “my-project” with whatever you want to name this specific development project.

After you run “vagrant up” it will take several minutes to download the code from the internet. Then you’ll be all set. You can browse http://192.168.33.10/

For shell access SSH to 127.0.0.1:2222 with the username of vagrant, and password of vagrant.

You’re all set.

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