My vagrant guidelines for happy devboxes

vagrant.md

Very rough description on how I use Vagrant. Uses some SSH magic to get easy git access to your private repos.

Host Setup

• Use most recent version of vagrant.
• Some tools and plugins:
  • vagrant-dns (MacOS only!) starts a local DNS Server, so that you can access your webserver with a domain name (not only an IP). After installation (vagrant plugin install vagrant-dns) run vagrant dns --install to initially setup some system configurations on your system. This will require you to enter your password once.
  • vagrant-vbguest - When you are using VirtualBox, it's recommended to install this plugin, which helps fighting some VirtualBox update issues.
  • vagrant-auto_network - When using many boxes, manually configuring gets tedious. Also it makes it hard to share the same Vagrantfile with your coworkers.

Prepare your local machine to play well with git inside the devbox: If you don't have already, teach your shell your git names. Edit, or create the file ~/.profile (or ~/.zprofile when using zsh) to include:

export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='your mail address'
export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='Your Name'
export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL='your mail address'
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME='Your Name'
export GIT_EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim

Setup ssh authentication hand-over to your local machine (like it is used when connecting to github or bitbucket), also tell the devbox about your git settings. Edit, or create the file ~/.ssh/config to include:

Host *
    SendEnv GIT_*

Box Setup

For a deeper reference, see our chef cookbooks.

This setup does not require Chef, I just happen to use it and stick with it for some time.

In your Vagrantfile you should setup "ssh agent forwarding":

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.ssh.forward_agent = true
end

Client OS:

For a deeper reference, see our packer templates.

Make sure your box can access your git server: /etc/ssh/sshd_config should include Acceptenv GIT_*.

Sharing a Devbox

Most projects I'm working on require a distinct setup, sometimes with very special requirement. Thats why I find it most useful to create a box for each project. This box can than easily be shared with your coworkers:

Although these steps are unique to git, probably most other VCS allow a similar setup.

• Create a "devbox" branch within your project's repository:

# Create a new orphan branch, detached from start
git checkout --orphan devbox

# clear the working tree
git rm --cached -r .

# remove all files (if you have hidden files like .rvmrc, you'll want to remove them as well)
rm -Rf ./*

• create your devbox (vagrant init)
• OR pull in a base repo like devbox-bookshelf (git pull https://github.com/dotless-de/devbox-bookshelf.git) and start costuming.

Sharing is caring

• Other checkouts (eg. for coworkers): git clone [email protected]/project/repo.git -b devbox your-project-devbox
• cd your-project-devbox
• Bring it up: vagrant up (or: vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusion when using VMWare Fusion)

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License: CC BY-SA 4.0