A Virtual Machine for Rails applications development

Introduction

This project automates the setup of a development environment for working on Rails applications.

Requirements

• VirtualBox

• Vagrant >= 1.1.2 required

• ssh-copy-id

• nfs-kernel-server package is required for Ubuntu users

How To Build The Virtual Machine

Building the virtual machine is this easy:

host $ git clone https://github.com/av-ast/rails-dev-box.git
host $ cd rails-dev-box
host $ bundle install
host $ cd vagrant/rails-dev-box
host $ bundle install
host $ berks --path ../../cookbooks
host $ vagrant up
host $ ssh-copy-id vagrant@10.0.1.13
host $ cd ../../
host $ knife solo cook vagrant@10.0.1.13 nodes/rails-dev-box.rb

That's it.

If the base box is not present it will be fetched first. If during the installation you will be asked to enter the password for vagrant user, just enter vagrant. After the installation has finished, you can access the virtual machine with

host $ cd vagrant/rails-dev-box
host $ vagrant ssh
...
vagrant@rails-dev-box:~$

What's In The Box

• rbenv 0.4.0

• Ruby 1.9.3

• Bundler 1.3.5

• Postgresql 9.2

• Redis server 2.2.12

• Elasticsearch 0.20.6

Recommended Workflow

The recommended workflow is

• edit in the host computer and

• test and run application within the virtual machine.

Put project you are working on inside your host home directory. Vagrant mounts your home directory (via NFS) as /home_dir within the virtual machine:

vagrant@rails-dev-box:~$ ls /home_dir

so we are ready to go to edit in the host, and test in the virtual machine.

This workflow is convenient because in the host computer you normally have your editor of choice fine-tuned, Git configured, and SSH keys in place.

Virtual Machine Management

When done just log out with ^D and suspend the virtual machine

host $ vagrant suspend

then, resume to hack again

host $ vagrant resume

Run

host $ vagrant halt

to shutdown the virtual machine, and

host $ vagrant up

to boot it again.

You can find out the state of a virtual machine anytime by invoking

host $ vagrant status

Finally, to completely wipe the virtual machine from the disk destroying all its contents:

host $ vagrant destroy # DANGER: all is gone

Please check the Vagrant documentation for more information on Vagrant.