Creating Development Environments with Vagrant

Create and manage virtual development environments with Puppet, Chef, and VirtualBox using Vagrant

Overview

• Provision virtual machines using Puppet and Chef
• Replicate multi-server environments locally
• Set up a virtual LAMP development server

In Detail

Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases development/production parity, and makes the “it works on my machine” excuse a thing of the past.

“Creating Development Environments with Vagrant” is a practical, hands-on guide that walks you through the functionality of Vagrant, Puppet, and Chef to create powerful and flexible virtual development environments. Create your own virtualization environments containing configurations for different projects so that you can simulate complicated environments that can be easily shared with colleagues to get your projects up and running quickly and effortlessly.

“Creating Development Environments with Vagrant” starts with an introduction to virtualization and the concepts behind it, why it’s useful, and an overview of the architecture of Vagrant. We will learn to install Vagrant and get to know its prerequisites. Covering provisioning scripts with Puppet and Chef, learning to use them independently as well as with Vagrant to create a powerful combination.

If you want to locally test your projects, juggle multiple projects running on different versions of software, easily share technology requirement changes with colleagues, and, most importantly, want to perform all these tasks efficiently, then this book is for you.

“Creating Development Environments with Vagrant” will take you from a virtualization novice to running all of your projects across your team in robust, isolated virtual development environments.

What you will learn from this book

• Create Vagrant projects
• Sync folders with your virtual development environment
• Integrate your own machine with the virtual machine
• Manage provisioning the server configuration with Puppet and Chef
• Set up multiple virtual machines for a single project
• Configure your virtual environment on your network
• Build your own base box for Vagrant
• Import and manage operating system images in Vagrant
• Get to grips with good practices for developing projects on your local machine
• Set up a simple LAMP server for a Vagrant project

Approach

This is a practical, hands-on guide that will help you set up and implement virtual development environments with Vagrant easily and effortlessly.

Who this book is written for

“Creating Development Environments with Vagrant” is for developers, programmers, and coders who want to maintain multiple projects within their own environment. It is also aimed at companies who are looking to deploy ready-to-go development solutions for new staff or even existing staff moving to new projects, and to enforce a consistent and portable virtual development environment that is easy to create and quick to set up.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Vagrant
Chapter 2: Managing Vagrant Boxes and Projects
Chapter 3: Provisioning with Puppet
Chapter 4: Provisioning with Chef
Chapter 5: Provisioning with Vagrant using Puppet and Chef
Chapter 6: Working with Multiple Machines
Chapter 7: Creating Your Own Box
Appendix: A Sample LAMP Stack