Virtualization

A crash course

Why Do things virtually?

• Allows for you and a team developing on any platform you wish
• Develop against a server that will be the same as your production web server
• Use whatever tools you feel most comfortable with

What tools will we be using?

What role does Vagrant play?

Vagrant is essentially a wrapper around 

oracle's virtual box.  It provides a nice set 

of command line programs that allow you 

to do various things with a virtual box, like 

starting, stopping, suspending, etc...

 

It's the glue that makes the magic happen.

What role does Virtualbox play?

Virtualbox is virtualization software that 

allows you to run a computer inside your

computer.  That virtual machine (or box) 

has all the same properties of a normal 

computer.  It gets an ip address, needs 

dedicated resources (that your computer - the host) provides.  The operating system 

is arbitrary, but windows and linux play 

well with virtualbox.  

What role does Ubuntu play?

In a typical scenario, the web server that you deploy your websites and applications to will be some flavor of linux.  CentOS, Redhat (RHEL), and ubuntu have all become popular options for web servers.  

 

With that in mind, we'll run ubuntu inside of Virtual box, and our web server will live in there.  This means no more reliance on wamp, mamp, xampp, etc....

So to recap...

We'll use 

to control 

which will be

running some flavor of

which will allow us to

install things like 

So lets install stuff...

Vagrant

http://www.vagrantup.com

 

Virtual Box

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

 

Putty (windows users)

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

 

Windows Guide:

http://www.sitepoint.com/getting-started-vagrant-windows/

Now that we have everything installed, lets get a box up and running...

 

 

vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64 

This command will initialize a new Vagrantfile.  Open the newly created Vagrantfile in a text editor of your choice

vagrant up

This command will "spin up" a new box.  If your pc does not support virtualization, we'll find out now.

ssh, learn to love it

vagrant ssh

This command will login you into the vagrant box via ssh.  Windows users may have trouble with this step, that's where PuTTY comes in.  

vagrant ssh-config

This command should output the configuration details for ssh so you can ssh into the box via putty.

other vagrant commands

vagrant suspend

This command will essentially take a snapshot of the machine, and close it down.  Restarting the machine with vagrant up will not provision the box (more on this later)

vagrant provision

This command will run any provisioning scripts defined in the Vagrantfile.

vagrant destroy

Completely destroys a box, all state is lost.  Doing a vagrant up on this machine will need a reprovision.

This is not really useful...yet

In order to make this useful, we have to install stuff on the vagrant box (like web servery things, php, mysql, apache, etc...)

git clone git@github.com:ggoforth/bbu

Lets take a look at the new Vagrantfile

config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"

config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080

config.vm.provision "shell", path: "./scripts/provision.sh"

 

Running vagrant up from the root of the bbu project will vagrant up the box, and then provision it for use

This will take a while...

Once it's done, point your browser to:

 

http://localhost:8080

Further reading

Vagrant Docs:

https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2

Linux Shell:

http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php