Using Vagrant for local development

After having migrated our infrastructure configuration to puppet we finally switched to developing most of our projects in virtual machines. Vagrant is a huge help - it allows us to define concise configuration and provisioning instructions in one file, the Vagrantfile.

Most of our projects now contain a Vagrantfile which looks like this:

Vagrant.configure('2') do |config|
  config.vm.box = 'cargomedia/debian-7-amd64-cm'
  config.vm.network :private_network, ip: '10.10.10.12'
  config.vm.synced_folder '.', '/home/vagrant/denkmal', :type => 'nfs'

  config.librarian_puppet.puppetfile_dir = 'puppet'
  config.vm.provision :puppet do |puppet|
    puppet.module_path = 'puppet/modules'
    puppet.manifests_path = 'puppet/manifests'
  end

  config.vm.provision 'shell', inline: [
    'cd /home/vagrant/denkmal',
    'composer --no-interaction install --dev',
    'bin/cm app setup',
  ].join(' && ')
end

Basically we’re specifying a virtualbox image (box) to download and use, then let the librarian-puppet plugin install all necessary puppet modules and finally configure two provisioners: one to apply a puppet manifest (installing all necessary software, add an nginx vhost etc.) and one to set up the application. Check the original file for additional details.

Vagrant Cloud

In our Vagrantfiles we’re not specifying any download URL for the boxes. Vagrant Cloud resolves the organization/name identifier to a download link. This has the big advantage that one can publish new version of boxes on Vagrant Cloud, and all users of that box will be able to update their local copy by running vagrant box update.

The Debian boxes we use for development and production are available on Vagrant Cloud in three flavours:

• cargomedia/debian-7-amd64-plain: Minimalistic Debian.
• cargomedia/debian-7-amd64-default: Like above, plus git, rsync, ruby and puppet.
• cargomedia/debian-7-amd64-cm: Like above, plus CM framework dependencies.

The code to build, test, upload and release these boxes is on Github at cargomedia/vagrant-boxes.

Vagrant Cloud has an API (closed beta currently) which allows one to CRUD boxes and their versions programmatically. We’ve built a small ruby wrapper for being able to release new versions automatically after they are built.

Conclusion

Using vagrant for local development gives us a repeatable and isolated environment setup. Additionally we can use vagrant boxes for bootstrapping production and staging machines on AWS’ EC2.

Thanks to everyone involved in the Vagrant ecosystem! The toolset available is amazing and mostly non-interactive :)