pp-development

A Performance Platform development environment that uses alphagov/pp-puppet to provision you a virtual machine.

DEPRECATED: Moving to pp-puppet

All the scripts and setup tools in this repo are being moved to pp-puppet. This repository should no longer be used.

Host machine prerequisites

• Vagrant (note that vagrant >=1.4 is required to use VirtualBox >=4.3)
  • And the vagrant-dns plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-dns
• Software to run the virtual machine
  • An exact version of VirtualBox for which there exists a machine image in $boxesByVersion in the Vagrantfile. At time of writing this means 4.3.6r91406 but more versions may be added in the future. Mixing versions of virtualbox and additions is unsupported.
  • VMware should also work
  • To improve performance, users of OSX can set the nfs flag to true in the Vagrandfile. Linux (nfs seems to be more buggy) users may need to install the following packages: nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap
  • local overrides to Vagrant config can go in a local file

Basic setup

• Clone this folder onto your local machine with git clone git@github.com:alphagov/pp-development.git. You can do this in your ~/govuk folder if you have one or in a separate ~/performance-platform folder
• Install dependencies with GOVUK_DEPS=true ./install.sh
  • Warnings about the pp-deployment repository can be safely ignored (it contains deployment secrets that you may not have access to)
• Start the virtual machine with vagrant up
  • VMWare users may hit an error
  • VirtualBox users should not ignore warnings about a mismatch between the version of VirtualBox and the Guest Additions. One known symptom is the inability to create symlinks inside Shared Folders, ie /var/apps
  • vagrant-dns occasionally has a problem, so may need additional configuration.
• Starting the machine should also provision it using Puppet (resulting in lots of lines beginning [bootstrap] Notice: /Stage[main]), but if it doesn't you can safely reprovision at any time with vagrant provision
• NOTE Initial provisioning of the machine may fail with an error message of the form:

  Error: No such file or directory - /var/apps/pp-puppet/.tmp/librarian/cache/source/puppet/forge/3792e516e3ff92a0ef9f5e827f8e76eb/smarchive/archive/version/7663d0c47292d3c50eb71d008ed8a340/archive/spec/fixtures/modules/archive/files
  
  Error: Try 'puppet help module install' for usage
  
  /var/apps/pp-puppet/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/librarian-puppet-0.9.13/lib/librarian/puppet/source/forge.rb:114:in `unlink': Directory not empty - /var/apps/pp-puppet/.tmp/librarian/cache/source/puppet/forge/3792e516e3ff92a0ef9f5e827f8e76eb/smarchive/archive/version/7663d0c47292d3c50eb71d008ed8a340 (Errno::ENOTEMPTY)
  

  If this happens, running vagrant provision again may fix it (issue #36).
• When provisioning has completed successfully you should see the line: [bootstrap] pp-development/tools/bootstrap-vagrant exit success
• SSH on to the virtual machine with vagrant ssh
• Install dependencies for each required app in /var/apps by following the instructions in their README files

Running apps

• SSH on to the machine with vagrant ssh
• Change to the development directory with cd /var/apps/pp-development
• Start the apps individually with bowl backdrop_read or bowl spotlight, or all together with bowl performance
  • The bowl command uses groups from the Pinfile, which runs commands from the Procfile

Routing from your local machine to your VM

This only works if your platform is OSX.

Each app runs on its own local port ie 3038, 3039, 3057. From inside the VM you can access apps directly at localhost:3038. If you install vagrant-dns, you can access the VM from the host through perfplat.dev subdomains, i.e www.perfplat.dev or spotlight.perfplat.dev.