Using Vagrant for VM management, development environments and dev/prod parity.

1. Using Vagrant
Andy Gale

2. Who are you?
Andy Gale
andy-gale.com
@andygale

3. What is Vagrant?
va·grant/ˈvāgrənt/
Noun:
A person without a settled home or
regular work who wanders from place
to place and lives by begging.

4. What is Vagrant?
A way of managing virtual machines
• Run different operating systems
• Define virtual machines in code
• Save your own ass

5. Why Vagrant?
Setting up a development
environment
• Often considered a right of passage
• Takes hours, often requires support
• Requires documentation that’s always
frequently out of date
• Breaking your development environment
can kill productivity for a day
• Produces unpredictable results

6. Why Vagrant?
Your development and production
environment are not the same!
• Different OS?
• Different version of PHP/Python/Ruby?
• Diverged package versions?
• Different default configuration files?

7. Why Vagrant?
• Update a website with a new feature.
• The feature relies on a PHP module that
is required by your web app
• Module already installed on your laptop
because another project that is hosted
elsewhere needed it
• It’s not a the server you deploy to, so the
entire website stops working
• You have no idea why, the same code
worked on your machine
• It worked on my machine!

8. Why Vagrant?
• Vagrant lowers development
environment setup time
• Maximizes dev/prod parity
• Makes the “works on my machine”
excuse a relic of the past.
from vagrantup.com

9. Vagrant sounds
good!

10. Getting Started
• Install Oracle’s VirtualBox
www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
• Install Vagrant (packages for
Windows, Mac, Linux)
downloads.vagrantup.com

11. Getting Started
Create a
$ vagrant box add precise32
http://files.vagrantup.com/
precise32.box
Intialise a workspace
$ cd workspace
$ vagrant init precise32

12. Configuration
• Simple to configure using the Vagrantfile -
A Ruby DSL - which can be kept in version
control
• Easy to forward ports:
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
# Forward guest port 80 to
# host port 4567
config.vm.forward_port 80,
4567
end

13. Configuration
Define shared folder
config.vm.share_folder "v-data", "/data", "../data"
Static IP
config.vm.network '192.168.0.100'
Set hostname
config.vm.host_name = "steve"
Boot with GUI
config.vm.boot_mode :gui

14. Vagrant Defaults
• /vagrant - shares your workspace
• Default username "vagrant"
• Default password "vagrant"

15. Multiple VMs
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.define :web do |web_config|
web_config.vm.box = "web"
web_config.vm.forward_port "http", 80,
8080
end
config.vm.define :db do |db_config|
db_config.vm.box = "db"
db_config.vm.forward_port "db", 3306,
3306
end
end

16. It’s alive!
Bring box up!
$ vagrant up
Connection to box
$ vagrant ssh
Close down box
$ vagrant halt
Delete box
$ vagrant destroy

17. So what else?
• Install all the packages you need
once
• Make it the same as your product
environment
• Make a base box and distribute
amongst developers
• What time has this actually saved

18. Package
$ vagrant package --vagrantfile

19. Provisioners
You can provision with:
• Shell
• Chef Solo
• Chef Server
• Puppet
• Puppet Server
• Build your own

20. Provisioners
Shell
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.provision :shell, :path =>
"test.sh"
end

21. Provisioners
Chef Solo:
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |
chef|
chef.roles_path = "roles"
chef.add_role("vm")
end
end

22. Provisioners
Chef Server:
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.provision :chef_server do |
chef|
chef.chef_server_url = "http://
chef.inter.net"
chef.add_role("vm")
end
end

23. Provisioners
Puppet:
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.provision :puppet do |
puppet|
puppet.mainfests_path =
"puppetmanifests"
puppet.mainfest_file = "newbox.pp"
end
end

24. Provisioners
Puppet Server:
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.provision :puppet_server do |
puppet|
puppet.puppet_server =
"puppet.inter.net"
puppet.puppet_node =
"vm.internet.net"
end
end

25. Provision with Chef
• A tool for automating the provisioning
and management of your servers
• Open source
• Lots of examples and code to get you
started

26. Chef
Very brief overview
Cookbooks
Collections of recipes, templates and other
configuration attributes to get stuff done.
Recipes
Chunks of Ruby code that describe what stuff
we need to do to get that stuff done.

27. Chef
My First Recipe
Install package
package "ntp" do
action :install
end Create config file
from template
template "/etc/ntp.conf" do
source "ntp.conf.erb"
owner "root" Restart service
group "root" when config file
mode 0644 changes
notifies :restart, resources(:service => "ntp")
end
service "ntp" do
action :start Define service and
end start NTP

28. Chef
Scary but you’re not alone
• Community cookbooks
http://community.opscode.com/
• IRC #chef on freenode
• Foodfight show podcast
http://foodfightshow.org/index.html
• Ask me andygale@andy-gale.com

29. Example
Get started with a CakePHP application environment
with Vagrant and Chef
• Install Oracle’s VirtualBox
• Install Vagrant
$ git clone git@github.com:salgo/cakefest-vagrant-chef.git
$ cd cakefest-vagrant-chef
$ ./git-fetch-submodules.sh
$ vagrant up

30. Vagrant and onwards
Will soon support new virtualisers
• OpenStack
• VMWare?
• Linux containers?
• Write your own?

31. Vagrant Tips
• If you’re running OS X make sure OS
updates are compatible with VirtualBox
- Oracle are quick to release fixes but
best to check
• Keep guest additions up to date with
https://github.com/dotless-de/vagrant-vbguest
• You can play with Chef in Vagrant so
there’s no excuse not to try

32. Official Boxes
Ubuntu Lucid 32 Bit
http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
Ubuntu Lucid 64 Bit
http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid64.box
Ubuntu Precise 32 Bit
http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box
Ubuntu Precise 64 Bit
http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box

33. Other Boxes
Example boxes here

34. Questions?