Posts Tagged ‘Vagrant’
Setting Up Development Environments With Vagrant and Ansible
One of the reasons I love running Linux on my main laptop/workstations is that I have an ideal environment to develop web projects. However there’s been many developments in software that moves away from this model which I have grown to love, and that is running your dev environments in virtual machines.
Instead of running Apache (or Nginx), MySQL and PHP natively on my dev machine, I have found it’s now easier to setup and run dev environments in virtual machines that are configured specifically for a given project, which can be automated through server management scripts. Initially this sounds like additional work, and it is but it has several advantages:
- Custom environments for each project
- Easily deployable for other developers in your team
- No knowledge required for other team members.
- Scripts can be reused for staging and development environments.
What are Vagrant and Ansible:
Vagrant is software that allows you to easily build reproducible development environments for various operating systems. It runs on top of other virtual machine platforms such as Virtualbox but, among other things, creates a sync drive that is accessible to your local file system, allowing you to use you IDE as you would normally without the need to transfer files to the machine.
Ansible, like Puppet or Chef is a server management scripting language. However the learning curve is a lot simpler and doesn’t require any software running on the remote servers. It configures the hosts over ssh.
By combining Vagrant with Ansible, it’s very easy to create development environments for developers who are running any common operating system within minutes without having to manually configure their dev environments to suit their operating system.
I have created Vagrant/Ansible setup script which can be found on Github. This will configure a development virtual machine that will have installed the latest versions of Nginx, MariaDB and PHP on Debian 7.
I think it’s worthwhile for any development teams to investigate using virtual machines like this, especially where complex environments are required.