Evolving WordPress Development With Vagrant

Yesterday we tagged version 0.2 of Varying Vagrant Vagrants, an evolving Vagrant configuration with an end goal of providing a system to pass development projects between team members at 10up for easy ramp up on projects. While any development project can be supported, our initial focus is WordPress. If you’re doing any kind of WordPress development, you should check it out. If you check it out and you fall in love, you should think about working with us.

UPDATE 04/12/03: This post is a great intro and provides good context  for the overall Vagrant discussion that’s been happening. Quite a bit has changed in the last few weeks and I would recommend stopping by Hi WordPress, Meet Vagrant for some of the latest fodder. Thanks!

What is Vagrant?

Vagrant is an open source “tool for building and distributing development environments”. Created by Mitchell Hashimoto, it provides a method to automatically provision a headless virtual machine for use with virtualization software such as VirtualBox. The various configurations of these virtual machines are sandboxed away from your local machine.

What is VirtualBox?

VirtualBox is open source virtualization software from Sun Microsystems. It provides a method to handle these prepackaged virtual machines, or boxes, that are configured with Vagrant.

What is Varying Vagrant Vagrants?

Varying Vagrant Vagrants is an exploration into the world of of Vagrant and how it can help to make development efficient and in sync with production systems. It replaces the common MAMP or XAMPP setups that we have become familiar with and ensures that all members of the team can develop in the same environment for a project without worrying about the operating system on their local machine.

One development environment is currently provided with Varying Vagrant Vagrants.  This includes Ubuntu 12.0.4 with Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL and Memcached. While this does not match every production environment, it has become a very common setup for highly scalable WordPress sites. It is these sites where developing in sync with production can be the most important. The closer we can come to matching the exact environment, the more likely we are to catch bugs and environment specific situations before deployment.

How Do I Get Started?

Getting started is easy, and will more than likely take you less than 30 minutes.

1. Download and install the latest version of VirtualBox for your operating system.
2. Download and install the latest version of Vagrant for your operating system.
3. Clone or download the Varying Vagrant Vagrants repository to a local directory.
4. Navigate to the new directory and type `vagrant up`

With that, your virtual machine is running. Test it immediately by going to 192.168.50.4 in a web browser. To start working with WordPress, one more step is necessary.

• Modify your local machine’s hosts file so that `local.wordpress.dev` is mapped to `192.168.50.4`.

Once mapped, visiting `local.wordpress.dev` in your browser will bring up an initial WordPress installation. Follow through that to create your first WordPress development environment in Vagrant. Themes and plugins that you are developing can go into the respective `www/wordpress-default/wp-content/` directories.

From here, you should experiment.

If you are familiar with object caching, the common plugins for working with PECL memcache can be installed. Memcached itself is already installed and running for when you’re ready.

If you start poking around the internal documentation for Varying Vagrant Vagrants, you’ll see quite a few places where you can hook in with customizations of your own to continue to extend the development environment.

What’s Next?

Two goals are driving the development for the next releases of Varying Vagrant Vagrants.

1. Provide a way to start with one of multiple WordPress configurations. Multisite is an obvious addition, but it would also be nice to include configurations for object caching as well as helpful development plugins.
2. Provide a way to pass projects around with a Vagrantfile and WordPress configuration included that can help others jump in to assit immediately.

Please feel free to pass along any feedback or issues with the current release via the GitHub issues page. Any input is much appreciated!

If you want to geek out on some context for my Vagrant experience so far, check out these posts:

• Varying Vagrant Vagrants – The initial post that started this all.
  
• A WordPress Meetup Introduction to Vagrant – Already slightly out of date, I provided these instructions when speaking at the Portland and Seattle developer meetups.