These are both great examples of showing your work. Andrea walks through the issue and shows things that didn’t work in addition to things that did. I was able to use the first to quickly solve an issue that I’ve been so close to figuring out, but have missed every time.
And! I haven’t gone through the second article yet, but the hidden gem there is that he has remote debugging with Xdebug working while running tests with PHPUnit. I’ve wanted this so much before.
All that aside (go read those articles!), I stumbled a bit following the instructions and wanted to log some of the settings I had to configure in order for PHPUnit to work properly with PHPStorm 9 and my local configuration.
For this all to work, I had to configure 4 things. The first three are accessed via PHPStorm -> Preferences in OSX. The fourth is accessed via the Run -> Edit Configurations menu in OSX.
A remote PHP interpreter
Choosing “Vagrant” in the Interpreters configuration didn’t work for me. I got an error that VBoxManage wasn’t found in my path when I selected my Vagrant instance and it tried to auto-detect things. I’m not sure if this is a bug or a misconfiguration. I almost wonder if it’s related to my recent upgrade today to Vagrant 1.7.4 and VirtualBox 5.0.
Instead I tried going forward with “SSH Credentials” to see what would happen. I put in the IP of the VVV box, 192.168.50.4, and the vagrant/vagrant username and password combination for SSH. I left the interpreter path alone and when I clicked OK, everything was verified. I was hesitant, because in the first step I had already deviated from the plan.
VBoxManage Error
Adding an interpreter
Configuring SSH Credentials
Full SSH configuration
PHPUnit configuration
This one was easier and didn’t require any altered steps. I added a remote PHPUnit configuration, chose the already configured remote interpreter and was good to close out.
SFTP deployment configuration
Because I was not able to get Vagrant configured properly in the first step, I am dealing with an entirely different path. PHPStorm wants to have a deployment configured over SFTP so that it can be aware of the path structure inside the virtual machine that leads to the tests.
Luckily nothing special needs to happen in the VM to support SFTP, so I was able to add 192.168.50.4 as the server and vagrant/vagrant as the username and password combination.
I originally tried putting the full path to WordPress here as the root directory, but that caused PHPStorm to prepend that on any automatic path building it did. I tried Autodetect as well, but that detected /home/vagrant, which did not work with the WordPress files. Through the power of deduction, I set the actual root / as the root. 😜
I also used the Mappings tab on this screen to match up my local wordpress-develop directory with the one I’m interacting with remotely.
Main SFTP Configuration
SFTP Mappings Configuration
Run/debug configurations
This one ends up being very straight forward now that everything else is configured. All I needed to do is select the phpunit.xml.dist file via its local path on my machine.
And then I was good! I can now run the single site unit tests for WordPress core just by using the Run command via green arrows everywhere in PHPStorm.
The tests took 3.14 minutes to run through the interface versus 2.45 minutes through the command line, but I was given a bunch of information on skipped tests throughout. I’ll likely stick to the command line interface for normal testing, though I’m looking forward to getting Xdebug configured along side this as it will make troubleshooting individual tests for issues a lot easier.
Big thanks again to Andrea Ercolina for the great material that brought me to a working config!
I’m about to delete my Reddit account because it’s weird to have these passwords around for accounts that I really have no intent of using. I did find one answer I left to a question about my “Evolving WordPress Development with Vagrant” post that I feel like saving for posterity.
Is there an advantage for a single designer/developer who uses MAMP to set up and develop WordPress sites? I read their docs but I couldn’t discern a real advantage if it’s just a single user configuration? – grafxbill
While there probably isn’t an immediate advantage, I would argue that if you can see yourself ever working with more than one site or a host that does not use a LAMP stack, then the long term benefits are worth it. Though one of my next goals is to setup a basic LAMP stack via Vagrant and at that point I’ll come back and tell you to ditch MAMP completely. 🙂
Caching alone is probably the most important reason for having a matching environment. These issues are so hard to troubleshoot locally if you don’t have the same setup. APC via MAMP can be helpful at first, but really duplicating the environment takes away a lot of assumption.
My other favorite thing is the quality of the sandbox. I can play around with server settings, screw everything up, and then ‘vagrant destroy’ to be back at square one without my personal computer feeling any of the side effects.
This is a smaller release in the grand scheme of things, though the first (!) as a new organization. The milestone has been ready for several weeks now. Thanks goes to Aaron Jorbin for prodding it along. 🙂
Quite a bit has been stable since v1.0, so we’re in a good spot to make a couple big changes in the next release including PHP 5.5.
This is a very transformative moment for the Varying Vagrant Vagrants project.
About a week ago, I reached out to Jake with a proposal to move VVV from under the wing of 10up to an organization of its own. We’ve been cruising along for just over a year, have around 125 unique visitors on the repository a day, and have a nice regular community of contributors. We have received pull requests from just around 40 contributors (!!!) and the issues are constantly a lively place of discussion.
Jake immediately agreed and we were able to talk through the process and the future very quickly. 10up has been a gracious and excellent host for VVV this entire time—the farewell post is great—and I’m looking forward to future steps we can take as a community now that we’re on our own.
I’d like to think that the goal to bring Vagrant to the forefront of WordPress developers’ minds has been accomplished. Through VVV and other related projects, the use of a development environment that closely matches production has come a long way.
I do think that VVV is the best tool out there for contributing to WordPress core. We provide stable, trunk, and develop versions of WordPress and everything needed to run the Grunt build tools and PHPUnit unit tests.
With that in mind, I think we should be able to line up a few goals.
Continue being the place for a WordPress core development environment. This primarily means that we stay on top of the tools that core introduces into the development flow. Providing an approachable way to use these tools and documentation will go a long way.
Directly related to goal one, some of the advancements we make should be around testing multiple versions of everything. If we can make it easy to fire up a PHP 5.x environment and test Nginx or Apache with WordPress 3.x or 4.x, that would be amazing.
VVV has an excellent method for auto site setups. Over time we’ve had some nice demand for a few that could help quite a bit. It would be great to see a couple that provide basic setups for WordPress multisite and WordPress under Apache rather than our default of Nginx.
Bring other tools to the forefront of WordPress developers’ minds. It may be great to see versions of VVV that harness Salt, Puppet, or Chef rather than the bash scripting that we’ve forced upon the project so far. VVV has an opportunity to be a learning tool for all of us in exploring methods of testing, provisioning, and deployment.
Right.
So please chime in with any suggestions that you may have. I’d love to toss the keys to a few new repositories over to anybody that’s interested in building out new tools. Feel free to use the main VVV repository under the Varying Vagrant Vagrants organization to open an issue and discuss your thoughts. We can split things off as needed.
Over time we’ll get more organized and setup a more official forum for discussions as well as some contributing guidelines. I’m going to reach out to a few regular contributors and get them added as committers. We also need to spend some time with licensing to see if we can get away with GPL for everything or if another would be more applicable to the work that we’re doing.
That’s that. Thank you all for being so great. Here’s to the next year of VVV. 🙂
A year ago yesterday, I decided I wanted to break up with MAMP.
A year ago today, the Varying Vagrant Vagrants repository was created after an exciting couple nights pounding away at a server config that allowed me to troubleshoot WordPress in Nginx on a local virtual machine.
Since then, VVV has had almost 750 commits from 36 contributors (!!!) on 121 pull requests. The project has been forked 135 times, has 61 watchers and 440 stars.
What a pretty cool year it has been.
Did I mention 36 contributors? On an average of about once every 10 days, somebody decides that VVV is interesting enough to stop what they are doing and submit a pull request containing an improvement.
This blows my mind. Thank you all.
Version 1.0
And now we’ve reached our 1.0 release, which brings us one of the coolest features yet thanks to a wonderful effort from Weston Ruter and Simon Wheatley.
Auto Site Setup
Auto Site Setup allows for projects to be picked up automatically by VVV with custom web structures, host names, Nginx configurations, and provisioning scripts. If you dig into the wiki page explaining how to get started, you’ll get an idea of how powerful it can be.
From a project version control standpoint, it’s fun to geek out about how this came together through a pull request of a pull request of a pull request.
Vagrant Up Just Works
For quite a while, if you ran `vagrant up` on a machine that had been halted, you would also have to run `vagrant provision` in order for all of the services to start up properly.
Version 1.0 is so much happier.
At this point `vagrant up` just works and your workflow can start to match exactly what is expected of a machine that is powered off rather than actually destroyed.
As a side effect of this change, we now copy our config files to the virtual machine from mapped drives on the local machine rather than symlinking them. This may cause some confusion at first if you’re used to changing the configs and having them immediately reflected, but it makes a lot more sense from a provisioning and state management standpoint. This is where `vagrant provision` can be used liberally to reapply any changed config. Commit 1fbf329 contains a more detailed description of the decision and the implementation.
Other Changes
Begin implementing best practices from Google’s shell style guide in our provisioning scripts.
Databases can now be dropped in phpMyAdmin. Pro-tip, drop database wordpress_develop in phpMyAdmin followed byvagrant provision clears your src.wordpress-develop.dev for reinstall.
Allow for dashboard-custom.php to override the default dashboard provided by VVV
Next?
We’re still moving forward. Check out the 1.1 milestone report on GitHub to see what’s in store for the next version and feel free to jump in with pull requests or questions. As part of a greater community of Vagrant users in WordPress, there is also a newer WordPress and Vagrant mailing list that has had some activity. Feel free to stop by and ask any questions there as well.
I got the following error earlier in OSX when launching my powered off VVV instance with `vagrant up`:
There was an error while executing `VBoxManage`, a CLI used by Vagrant for controlling VirtualBox. The command and stderr is shown below.
Command: ["hostonlyif", "create"]
Stderr: 0%...
Progress state: NS_ERROR_FAILURE
VBoxManage: error: Failed to create the host-only adapter
VBoxManage: error: VBoxNetAdpCtl: Error while adding new interface: failed to open /dev/vboxnetctl: No such file or directory
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component HostNetworkInterface, interface IHostNetworkInterface
VBoxManage: error: Context: "int handleCreate(HandlerArg*, int, int*)" at line 66 of file VBoxManageHostonly.cpp
I was able to fix this by running the following:
cd /Library/Application\ Support/VirtualBox/LaunchDaemons/
sudo ./VirtualBoxStartup.sh restart
This reset the services used by Virtualbox and allowed Vagrant to talk correctly to the virtual interfaces again. My guess is that this would help solve related errors as well, not just the one that I received.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of work this week in provisioning a development environment using CentOS, Salt, and Vagrant. There are few things I ran into along the way that were interesting enough to remember for a later time.
Disappearing Guest Additions
By default, Salt calls `yum -y update` during the process of installing itself. This, depending on your yum configuration, updates every package with an update available–including the kernel.
When the kernel is updated, it seems that the Guest Additions required by Virtualbox for proper communication between the virtual machine and your local machine get lost in the shuffle. Once they do, the box will not fire up again properly until after a `vagrant destroy`.
To get around this, I created a custom yum.conf file that excludes kernel updates by default. This file is synced over to the virtual machine through shell provisioning before Salt is initiated. As you can imagine, this significantly reduces the time spent provisioning the box as well.
In the future I’ll have to figure out if we can find or package a CentOS box that has a newer version of the kernel already installed.
Disappearing Salt Installation Script
Salt has a great installation process available where you can feed bootstrap.salt.org directly into a shell script. This URL currently redirects you to the shell script’s location inside a GitHub repository. When the script runs, it automatically detects what packages are required on your machine and determines how they should be installed.
Unfortunately, GitHub returns a 404 every so often when calling the URL repeatedly via Vagrant’s use of Curl. This means that when first building out your configuration and doing a lot of `vagrant destroy`/`vagrant up`, things fail quite often when Salt can’t install itself on the box.
Luckily, you can specify a custom bootstrap script to run in Vagrant. I copied the version verbatim from Salt’s GitHub account and now include it locally with the WSUWP Environment.
As a bonus, this allowed me to do one extra thing. The process of installing Salt through Vagrant uses the current stable version of Salt for your Linux distribution. I was able to force the use of ‘testing’ packages in the bootstrap script so that my CentOS box would have Salt 0.17.1, rather than the stable RPM for 0.16.4.
Over Firewalled
As an Ubuntu user, the common–well, to me at least–default use of iptables in CentOS always confuses me. Account for this when provisioning and provide some default rules. Things like incoming HTTP requests are blocked by default. This can be annoying if you aren’t expecting it and start troubleshooting problems that you think are with Nginx.
Picking a CentOS Vagrant Box
I first used the nrel.gov minimal box from vagrantbox.es, but MySQL 5.1.69 was preinstalled and at the time it seemed like I had to uninstall all of those packages before reinstalling with the 5.5 packages. It’s possible that the repositories I settled on (see next point) would have made it easier to upgrade, but I got the impression that the box had other preinstalled stuff and I decided to switch. The Puppet Labs box, even though I’m using Salt, has been exactly what I’ve needed thus far.
Better Server Software Repositories
The default repositories for CentOS 6.4 are still on PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.1, which is a little lame. Thanks to the recommendation of Zach Brown, I went with the Remi repositories for installing PHP, MySQL, and Memcached. For Nginx, we’re able to use a repository maintained by Nginx directly. Both of these repositories have been great so far.
It took us 105 or so days, we added about 200 commits, went through somewhere around 10 Vagrant releases, and things are looking sweet. The last few months have been great preparation toward a couple bigger features that are slated to be part of version 1.0 in the coming months.
What’s the best part?
We crossed 30 contributors and 100 forks. The community around VVV has been fantastic to work with.
So yeah, here’s the awfully long changelog of great things that made it into the v0.9 release. Keep your eyes open for v1.0!
Possible Annoying: Use precise32 for the Vagrant box name for better cross project box caching.
Note: This will probably cause a new Vagrant box to download. Use vagrant box remove std-precise32 after avagrant destroy to remove the old one and start with this.
Possible Breaking: Change VM hostname to vvv.dev
Note: If you had anything setup to rely on the hostname of precise32-dev, this may break.
Possible Breaking: Change MySQL root password to root
Note: If anything is setup to rely on the previous password of blank, this may break.
You can also now access mysql -u root without a password.
Introduce support for the WordPress develop.svn
This was added pretty much the day it was available. Such a pleasure to work with!
Allowed us to remove the old wordpress-unit-tests in favor of the new wordpress-develop/tests
Introduce support for the Vagrant hostsupdater plugin
Use vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater to install.
Very, very much recommended for an easier and happier life.
Introduce Postfix with a default config. Mail works! (But check your spam)
Introduce the WordPress i18n Tools, including config/homebin/makepot
Introduce PHP_CodeSniffer, WordPress-Coding-Standards, and Webgrind
Remove entire well intended but not so useful flags system
Rather than include PHPMemcachedadmin in the VVV repository, download it on initial provision
Verify support for Vagrant 1.3.5 (as well as 1.2.x) and Virtualbox 4.3 (as well as 4.2.x)
Move xdebug_on and xdebug_off controls to executable files in config/homebin
Generate vagrant_dir in Vagrantfile for accessing relative file locations
Add a basic network connectivity check by pinging Google DNS servers
Update stable version of WordPress automatically on provision
General cleanup to screen output during provisioning
This is a companion blog post to my presentation at WordCamp Vancouver on August 17th, 2013. You can download the PDF of the slides or read through the following for the context that is often missing when reading a presentation at a later time. WordPress.tv also has a video of the talk posted.
Hi WordPress, Meet Vagrant
Story Time
It was December 10th, 2012, the night of our WordPress developer meetup in Portland, that I decided I wanted to break up with MAMP.
He then pointed me to a guide on GitHub that Humanmade uses for all new recruits, this guide being a great compilation of procedures to follow to get Nginx and the like up and running in your local (OSX) environment.
I immediately fell in love with this idea and started soaking up info. Screw MAMP, I was going to have an Nginx setup on my Mac.
About an hour after this, I finally replied to Micah, telling him that I hadn’t looked at it, but that it looked cool.
Fast forward a couple hours, I had to put most of this aside as I had a day job to concentrate on and breaking up with MAMP needed to wait until after hours. My tweets got more excited and I made my way to the developer meetup in a really good mood.
Justin Sainton, who is actually speaking next in this room, gave a great talk that night with an excellent title, “WP E-Commerce, I Hate You with the Fire of a Thousand Suns“, about the progress that’s been made toward refining the code base and improving the feature set. After Justin’s talk I continued my ranting to a few others about breaking up with MAMP and installing Nginx with homebrew instead. Daniel Bachhuber made a comment along the lines of – “why would you want to install all that junk on your computer?”
This is a good point.
Why would I want to install all that junk on my computer. I turned back to Micah’s first tweet suggesting that I check out Vagrant, determined to give it another chance.
And that’s when it clicked.
I just barely typed in "vagrant ssh" and I'm already scared of the power I have unleashed.
And so an obsession began. Developer lives changed. A super long name was shortened to VVV (sometimes I even call it V-trip). And within the next few months I was able to uninstall MAMP completely and convince others at 10up and in the community that Vagrant was the way to go.
My Goals
Which is why I’m here at WordCamp Vancouver. To introduce you to Vagrant and get you obsessed. I want each of you to leave this talk amped up to use Vagrant for WordPress development. And I’m pretty sure it’s going to work. After all, you are at…..
And we all know that this acronym was chosen because…
I should admit that I have some hidden agendas.
While this talk is going to go a long way in showing you a superior development environment that will change your life, there’s much more at stake. This is why you should keep my goals in your head while we go through this. 🙂
L(inux) – don’t need it. Love it, yes. Don’t need it.
A(pache) – Nginx is better. We can debate, but it is. Or what about lighttpd?
M(ySQL) – is great! But for how long? What about MariaDB or Percona? Well, I guess MariaDB fails to make my point, but Percona would leave us with LAPP.
P(HP) – Ok, that’s sticking around.
You’ve hopefully seen the new develop repository from a couple weeks ago at the beginning of the 3.7 cycles that starts to make use of Grunt for core development. Having a Vagrantfile to provide an agreed upon development environment for testing between versions of WordPress and PHP and MySQL and Apache and Nginx and… would be pretty slick.
We contribute in so many ways as a community to the WordPress project and there is a need for sysadmin contributions. It would be great to have a clear way for those who have sys admin experience to contribute to the WordPress project.
Anyhow, my goals aside.
As we’re covering the ins and outs of Vagrant, I’d like you to also tune in to ways Vagrant can fit into your development work flow, how it may have helped you solve problems faster in the past, and how it’s going to make you solve problems faster in the future.
Before we get into it, I want to exercise some hand raising powers.
Who here is a developer?
Who here is a sys admin, or manages servers in some way?
Who here is a developer and uses MAMP or XAMPP or WAMP?
Who here is a sys admin, or manages servers in some way, and thinks Apache is better than Nginx?
Who in the room has installed Vagrant on their machine before?
Who has used it more than once after installing it?
Who is using it day to day for their development environment?
What’s Vagrant?
How Did We Get Here?
I’ll get to what Vagrant is in a bit, but first I’m going to cover what we’ve been working with until now.
Has anyone ever used the term cowboy coding to describe the editing, obviously by others, of code on a live server?
Well, for a long while, cowboy coding didn’t seem so bad.
In fact, the beginning of WordPress development was very much all about it. Quite a few members in the WordPress community learned to code by sharing snippets with each other. If you visit the archives of Matt’s blog, there are code snippets to be found, ready to be hacked into your templates at will.
It was the wild west in the era of open source blogging and white screens were a great way of telling when something bad happened.
Luckily, this didn’t last forever. As familiarity with WordPress, PHP and MySQL progressed, local LAMP environments arrived. Apache, PHP and MySQL all had binaries that could be installed in Windows or Mac and a minimum environment could be setup with relative ease. White screens now had the opportunity to happen locally first and therefore more rarely in production.
Even better, MAMP, XAMPP and WAMP came along and provided a method of creating a stable LAMP sandbox for us to play in with just a few clicks. With the minimum requirements for WordPress development met, things got stable and stale. Having this stable sandbox environment goes a long way when building basic WordPress themes or plugins for customers.
Over the last several years, things have changed quite a bit in the landscape of the web, as they always do.
Nginx became a web server to be reckoned with and is now considered by many to be more powerful and performant than Apache.
Linux, MySQL, and PHP remain for the most part, but other additions like Memcached or Varnish are becoming more useful to WordPress developers to maintain object and page caches as sites are required to scale larger and larger while handling an assortment of traffic patterns.
Now, because of the way technology changes on us, when you sit down at your local machine and develop in a friendly familiar LAMP stack, there’s no guarantee that you’ll end up publishing your code to the same environment.
At the most extreme, it can be like only training in a swimming pool before jumping in to swim across the Pacific Ocean.
Personally, I can go back and find so many hours that were spent troubleshooting things that I could not reproduce locally because my environment did not match some unexpected thing on production.
Now. If you have the right OS, you may have filtered through a barrage of various tutorials online to piece together a sloppy system of manually installed packages that come close to matching your production environment, but good luck when you need to change something or develop a product that needs to exist in a different (or even multiple) environment.
Vagrant is the Magic You’ve Been Looking For
The last of Arthur C Clark’s three rules described in “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination” states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
When I sat down and used Vagrant for the first time, it was magic. I had no idea what was going on, but it was going on and I liked it. And it makes sense that it seem like magic at first because really cool things happen without much effort.
Over the last 8 months I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into what Vagrant is and what it means for development and I can now appreciate it as a piece of advanced technology with many possibilities for expansion and use rather than the magic it started as.
Even so, it still feels like magic.
30000 Feet
Before we get into any detail, let’s back up and cover this from 30k feet with one of my favorite things in the world. An analogy.
Your Computer is a Beautiful Lawn
It starts off well manicured, with nicely defined paths around kept gardens that have some wrought iron fencing around them, helping to keep clean. There may even be a couple police officers hanging out to make sure that nothing bad is going on.
A server is a large, beautiful beach connected to the ocean. So many possibilities for digging holes and building sand castles and creating complex moats for waves to come through to visualize how well your sand castle was constructed.
XAMPP/MAMP is a small sandbox in your yard. You have an old tire, maybe a pail. Some shovels and a few rocks that you can play with. You can test out some structures in the sand if you’d like in preparation for the big beach day. If you get real fancy, you might even drag over a hose to spray down the sand castle just to see what happens.
Installing server software directly on your computer is like having a load of sand delivered to your house and dumped on your front lawn. You can probably do a bunch with it, lay out as if it was a beach and build a sand castle or two, but that well manicured look you started with will go away and over time it’s going to become harder and harder to keep track of where all that sand went.
Vagrant is an extreme sandbox. You can do whatever the heck you want with a beach worth of sand, moving it around and building and getting in trouble. If you flip a front loader or a bulldozer goes crazy and starts running things over, no big deal. Hit the reset button and you get to start over.
And when you’re done for the day, only one command stands between you and the personal computer that remains a beautiful garden.
Now that we have a picture of what we’re shooting for, let’s back up again and start over on the ground.
What is Vagrant?
Well, soon.
First, let’s start with virtual machines.
Virtual machines are fictional computers.
Completely made up stories that have no true hardware, but exist as long as they are described.
Through something known as “platform virtualization”, these fictional computers, or guests are able to use the hardware resources provided to them on a host machine without actually controlling those resources themselves. This allows the fictional computers to have, among other things, a processor, memory, hard drives, and network access. In fact, multiple virtual machines (or guests) can be running on the same host at once, all sharing the host’s hardware in a safe way through virtualization.
Virtualbox is GPL licensed platform virtualization software that provides an interface for managing and using these virtual machines. It takes care of figuring out exactly how all of the hardware on your host machine is made available to any guest machine in a safe way.
Vagrant is MIT licensed open source software for “creating and configuring lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.”
Vagrant gives you a method to write the story that describes each fictional computer to be virtualized on your host machine so that you can share the story with others, passing around development environments as if it was code.
Probably the greatest part about all of this is that both Vagrant and Virtualbox have installers available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. This means that as a Mac user, I can pass the description of a fictional computer to a Windows user and we can both be confident that we’re looking at the exact same thing when we boot it up. And while the most popular operating system used inside the virtual machine itself is certainly some flavor of Linux, it’s entirely possible that a Windows or OSX machine can be described and passed around as well.
That’s pretty amazing.
Anatomy of a Virtual Machine Built With Vagrant
Let’s talk about the anatomy of a virtual machine built with Vagrant.
Host
Your local machine is the host. It has Vagrant and Virtualbox installed and a copy of the fictional machine story that’s ready to boot up at any time. The hard drives and network devices belong to it at all times.
Guest
Any virtual machine created through virtualization on your host computer is the guest. It is temporarily using the resources of the host, until you tell it to shut down and disappear.
Box
Vagrant provides a way to package boxes. These boxes contain at least an installation of an operating system as well as some guest additions that help any platform virtualization software communicate between host and guest. This base box can be as heavy or as light as you want. It can be a bare bones Ubuntu or CentOS installation with no server software other than that required by Vagrant to do its job. It could also contain all of the various server packages that you need, Nginx, MySQL, etc..
Provisioning
Provisioning makes having a bare bones box most ideal. This is what helps make Vagrant lightweight and reproducible. I can pass a base box around or share it among several different projects and then pass along unique provisioning scripts that explain and automate how the box should be configured as it boots.
Let’s walk through the step by step of getting a base.
Download and install [Virtualbox](http://virtualbox.org)
Download and install [Vagrant](http://vagrantup.com)
Type `vagrant init`
Create and then navigate to an empty directory on your computer via the command line and type `vagrant init`
This creates a Vagrantfile file in this empty directory that describes the virtual machine you are looking to start.
edit Vagrantfile
Type `vagrant up`
This is the magic part.
Through no additional interaction an empty Ubuntu box is available for my use on my computer. All I need to do is go to a command prompt, type `vagrant ssh` and I’m in. From there I can do anything that I would normally do with a fresh server instance.
Provisioning
Here is where provisioning comes in. While a base server is pretty awesome on its own, it doesn’t do too much for us if we have to install all of the server software every time that we boot the machine.
There are a few provisioners enabled with Vagrant by default – Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Shell, with another one, Salt, almost officially in.
These provisioners help describe the story of the virtual machine that you are building every time you start a new instance. Each offers a similar feature set and mostly differs on syntax and organization. I’ll leave a few links in the slides so that you can familiarize yourself with them later.
Great power lies in the use of these provisioners, especially when pushing server configurations to production. I do suggest sticking with shell provisioning at first unless you are already familiar with something else or using it to configure production servers already.
I should mention that again. Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and Salt are already popular tools for server provisioning. There is a chance that you are or an amazing server admin in your life already has some sort of provisioning script setup that you can use to immediately duplicate production in your development environment. And if this happens, and the configuration is for WordPress, you should totally open source it so that we can all share in the love.
So I’m a bit biased as I’ve been working on this for the last 8 months, but I do think it’s a good and approachable example. Let’s walk through the shell provisioning taken from the open sourced Varying Vagrant Vagrants.
This Vagrant configuration is an opinionated attempt to mimic a fairly common server configuration used for performant WordPress projects. We’ve put quite a bit of work into this and have had an amazing number of contributions from the community already. I really would recommend grabbing this and using it to get your feet wet if not as your daily development environment for WordPress projects. Do note that the Internet today will probably not support the sudden `vagrant ups` of 100 developers, so you may need to wait until you get home.
And now, only a couple minutes stand between my beautiful lawn and having an extreme sandbox up and running. In fact, if I power off the virtual machine without destroying it completely, we’re looking at an extremely short start up time whenever I want to dive in.
And with Varying Vagrant Vagrants, once `vagrant up` is complete, I have everything I need.
An environment with Nginx, PHP 5.4, MySQL, both APC and memcached, the latest stable WordPress, trunk WordPress, WordPress unit tests, WP-cli, not to mention a whole range of smaller tools that make development easier.
I uninstalled MAMP shortly after creating this and haven’t looked back.
I know this might seem a little crazy on the outside for some of you. Who wants to spend all that time in the command line, right? You should know that once everything is configured in the provisioning script, there’s little chance that you’ll ever need to go into the command line via `vagrant ssh` if you don’t feel like it. Just develop as normal on your local ‘host’ machine and view the changes in the browser. The only commands you’ll need to issue are those to start and stop the Vagrant. And rumor has it that a GUI is possible for these in the future.
Why should you develop in an environment that matches production?
Vagrant allows you to version control your environment. In fact, the project I’m working on now started with a Vagrantfile.
At Washington State University, we’re in the beginning stages of a project that intends to provide a central publishing platform based on WordPress for any college or department inside the University to use.
I started the repo with a Vagrantfile.
Once I had that, I was able to add WordPress in and then start making the customizations we’re looking for through various plugins and configuration changes.
Now, as we work toward a place where the server architecture is finalized, we can adjust the development environment in the project repository as needed to see if any new problems arise while we continue to build out and use existing code. With the development environment under version control, we can document reasons for software changes or revert to something earlier if an issue does come up.
Vagrant allows you to share your environment. The ramp up time for developers on the project is almost nothing. Just a git clone separates them from having a full, matching development environment on their local machine. No risk to the server. No worry about the developer being on Windows or Mac or Linux.
Imagine working for a customer that is going to host their site on WPEngine and knowing with absolute confidence that the theme you created locally will work without issue.
Or knowing that customers using default WordPress installations on Dreamhost or Bluehost will have not troubles using the plugin that your about to publish to the WordPress plugin repository.
I should stress that while Vagrant is very much going to replace MAMP for you, it is not a MAMP replacement.
Because that’s not what you should want. Instead of one environment restricted to technology that the community needed years ago, you should want a flexible environment that can adapt seamlessly to the technologies that the community must work with today.
Rather than meeting the WordPress minimum requirements we talked about earlier, Vagrant provides a flexible way for a developer to meet their project’s environment requirements.
Wrap Up
Magic?
Advanced technology?
Ready to start using Vagrant on a day to day basis?
I really hope you go home and go through your first vagrant up and then tell me about it later, because it’s a wonderful experience to see how quickly your development can change with a new, more carefree environment.
