Varying Vagrant Vagrants

I decided yesterday that I wanted to break up with MAMP. While it (and XAMPP) have served their purpose well over the last year or so that I’ve been using them on a regular basis, they don’t come close to mirroring some of the most common server setups out there today for the development that I’m doing.

I want to break up with MAMP.

— Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt) December 10, 2012

Most of the smarter setups for PHP dev these days include some combination of nginx, mysql, php-fpm and memcached – at least. The thought of trying to get all of these packages installed and working on a local OS X machine is overwhelming. This computer of mine should be a laptop, not a server.

Luckily, I’m not alone in this dilemma and I got a couple of great replies right off the bat. One came from Tom Willmot pointing me toward some fantastic onboarding docs for Human Made on GitHub that walk through setting up services in OS X. I started down that path because it looked great, but I was also tempted by a reply from Micah Godbolt asking if I had been keeping an eye on Vagrant. That temptation ended up winning the night.

Enter the virtual machine.

I had heard of Vagrant briefly, but had never given it a full chance. I was probably in one of those modes where I would move on if I couldn’t figure it out in less that two minutes. This desire to break up with MAMP finally gave me the will power needed to put in more time.

It turns out that Vagrant is freaking wonderful.

And just over 24 hours later, I have my first draft of a provisioned server up on GitHub as Varying Vagrant Vagrants. It’s fantastic.

I am now able to fire up an instance with a simple ‘vagrant up’ that automatically installs nginx, php-fpm, mysql before proceeding to move config files around and import SQL dumps so that just minutes after the initial command, I can go to an existing dev site in my browser or initiate a brand new WordPress install.

Sold.

So now I’m on the hunt for more. I’m going to head over to the Portland Drupal User Group meeting tomorrow night for a demo on Vagrant and Puppet and I’m now hoping to start filling my brain with everything Vagrant. There are so many possibilities for sharing dev environments with team members and I can see this turning out to be a ton of fun.

With all that said, get over to GitHub and fork Varying Vagrant Vagrants to see for yourself. I’ve done my best to include some documentation that should get you all the way there, but feel free to reach out if you need some help.