Development environments often involve setting up development versions of servers, databases, and other services that are used to simulate microservice architectures while attempting work on one piece or microservice. The ad hoc nature of these efforts often leaves machines in odd states. The theory that servers should be "cattle, not pets" -- in other words, have a low barrier to discard and re-create -- has been difficult.
There are no perfect solutions to this. One tolerably good solution is to use a virtualized desktop machine, such as supported by VirtualBox. The host environment can stay stable and clean, and the guest machine can be more easily disposed of.
One feature of virtualbox that makes this more attractive are guest additions that allow cutting and pasting between a guest desktop and the host system. Using these, it is feasible for a develper to use the host system for testing (through exposed ports) and admin (email, documentation production, team communications, etc.) while doing the actual development work on the guest desktop, where an IDE or equivalent tool is the center of effort.
This repository is designed to be used when a developer has a host system that
can run vagrant and wants to have an easily reproducible development
environment.
devsetup is designed to eliminate the tedious setup steps necessary
for setting up environments.
It is a collection of reusable pieces that can be put together and customized so that a developer can think through the process once, then after that quickly reproduce the environment.
Set up the vagrant. The Vagrantfile included in this repository is for a workable Ubuntu desktop. Others can be used, although obviously any change might make the customizations work differently. Review the Vagrantfile before using it to make certain that exported ports, memory allocation, and number of cpus is set appropriately for the development guest machine.
It doesn't really matter what the host system is running, as long as vagrant and
virtualbox are supported. However, the Vagrantfile as provided requires a directory
in the vagrant directory called xfer which will appear as /vagrant_data on the
guest machine. The name of the guest machine directory is hardcoded into many of
the customization scripts, so do not change this.
When the Vagrantfile is ready, you can bring up the vagrant with the command
vagrant up
Bootstrap devsetup. Once the vagrant is running, you should set up a subdirectory
of the home directory (which is /home/vagrant) with devsetup in it. There are two
roughly equivalent ways of doing this:
sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/edgiese/devsetup
The second way is to transfer a zip file with devsetup into it and create the directory and unzip the file. There is little difference between these approaches.
Once devsetup has been installed, you can build a new script using customizations, or you can
import a saved configuration