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.

Do this now

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"

Magic happens here

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