Add a Vagrant file to automatically deploy an Ubuntu 14.04 development VM

[bbenoist]

Mostly inspired from the existing Vagrantfile in Math.Net Numerics.

See https://www.vagrantup.com/ for more information about the Vagrant software.

[bbenoist]

If you want to test the PR:

1. Install VirtualBox and the VirtualBox Extension Pack from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads or with your favorite package manager (which should respect the PUEL 😫).
2. Install Vagrant from https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html or with your favorite package manager.
3. With a shell, cd to the FAKE root directory and run vagrant up. The VM will be automatically downloaded, imported into VirtualBox, configured and started.
4. Run vagrant ssh to directly connect via SSH to the VM and start working. The FAKE source directory is automatically shared with the VM under the /vagrant directory.
5. Once you have finished, you can either:
   • Run vagrant suspend to pause the VM.
   • Run vagrant halt to shutdown the VM.
   • Run vagrant destroy -f to delete the imported VM.
   • Run vagrant box remove ubuntu/trusty64 to remove the base box from your computer.
6. Simply re-run vagrant up to reload the VM.

⚠️ The file build.sh had crlf on Windows and I had to update the .gitconfig file to force the use of lf. You may need to change it manually on your local Git clone.

[forki]

What does this give us? I never used vagrant.

[bbenoist]

Well, Vagrant helps in the creation and configuration of lightweight, reproducible and portable development environments.

It places itself on top of most virtualization products (e.g. VirtualBox, VMware) and uses SSH or WinRM to leverage the provisioning (e.g. shell commands, puppet, chef) on booted virtual machines.

Thus, by writing a Vagrantfile, you can give developers the possibility to deploy an appropriate OS and configuration with only one vagrant up command.

As an example, here is how I managed to build FAKE on Ubuntu (I omitted the crlf issue with build.sh to be more concise):

1. Created a Vagrantfile template with vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64.
2. Edited the Vagrantfile to fit with the needs of F# development on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Mostly taken from Math.NET Numerics.
3. Ran vagrant up. The tool automatically:
   • Downloaded the base box from the Vagrant public repository.
   • Imported it into VirtualBox.
   • Started it and waited for SSH to be accessible.
   • Connected via SSH to install the required tools.
4. Built FAKE with vagrant ssh -c "cd /vagrant && bash build.sh"

Because I created my Ubuntu development VM with a Vagrantfile, other people now just have to install the system-wide prerequisites then reproduce steps 3 and 4 to get an Ubuntu development environment ready.

Also, as everything is in a VM, they just have to vagrant provision or vagrant destroy -f whenever it has to be updated or gets updated.

IHMO, its biggest usage would be for Windows people testing their development on a *nix system. However it's use can be extended up to many other scenarios (more to come).

[forki]

ok cool

[bbenoist]

Nice 😎 Dedicaded markdown documentation incoming...