devbox

devbox is a Vagrant development machine provisioned and preconfigured for working with PHP and the Laravel framework out of the box. From nginx, php5.4 over beanstalkd to composer it has got everything you need for Laravel 4.

Features / Stack

Ubuntu 12.04 32bit, Nginx, PHP5.5, php-fpm, xdebug, composer, MySQL 5.5, PostgreSQL 9.3, Redis, Beanstalkd, supervisord, Sphinx, ngrok, Node.js, MongoDB

Requirements

• VirtualBox - Free virtualization software
• Vagrant - Tool for working with VirtualBox images

Initial Setup

• Install VirtualBox and Vagrant ( >= 1.3.0)
• Clone this repository git clone https://github.com/Aboalarm/devbox.git.
• Run vagrant up inside the newly created directory. (the first time you run Vagrant it will fetch the virtual box image which is ~300mb. So this could take some time)
• Vagrant will now use Puppet to provision the devbox (this could take a few minutes)
• Point "devbox" and any other vhosts to 192.168.3.3 in your hosts file of your host OS. e.g. 192.168.3.3 devbox myproject.dev myotherproject.dev [HOSTNAME]
• Now just clone/copy your Laravel projects into www/[HOSTNAME] and open http://[HOSTNAME] in your browser. Done!

Shared Folders

The www folder is automatically synced to the VM (/var/www). This is why we clone our Laravel project into this folder. The sync works in both directions. So any files generated by Laravel (/storage folder for example) will be accessible from your host machine.

Important note about Installing NPM Packages

Later versions of VirtualBox do not support symlinks in shared folders. More info is available here: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10085

This can cause problems when you're attempting to install certain packages via npm. For example, the 'jade' and 'express' packages create symlinks during installation, and therefore the installation will fail in the shared 'app' directory.

The best workaround for this is to install node packages in your shared folder with the --no-bin-links flag, e.g.

npm install express --no-bin-links

If VirtualBox is your provider and you're using MacOS, you may also want to try to uncomment the "setextradata" customization in the VagrantFile to allow symlinks to work.

I'm not sure how this affects other Virtual Machine providers.

Credentials

• SSH User: vagrant PW: vagrant
• MySQL User: root PW: root (access MySQL through SSH)

Vagrant Commands

• vagrant up starts the virtual machine and provisions it
• vagrant ssh gives you shell access to the virtual machine
• vagrant suspend will essentially put the machine to 'sleep' with vagrant resume waking it back up
• vagrant reload will reload the VM. Do this when the VM config changed. For exmpale when you changed one of the configs (e.g. php.ini, sphinx.conf, etc. or after a git pull of this repo)
• vagrant halt attempts a graceful shutdown of the machine and will need to be brought back with vagrant up
• vagrant halt --force force shutdown if normal halt doesn't work
• vagrant destroy you broke something? this will destroy the VM and reprovisions it again completely. Takes some time.

For more: Vagrant is very well documented

Please fork, improve, extend, make pull request, wrap it as a gift. Use the GitHub Issues!

Ngrok

Ngrok creates a tunnel from the public internet (http://subdomain.ngrok.com) to a website on your local machine. You can give this URL to anyone to allow them to try out a website you're developing without doing any deployment. For all the features and documentation, check their site: http://ngrok.com and usage guide: http://ngrok.com/usage.

Setup:

• In /etc/nginx/sites-available/ngrok.dev change root path (ie. replace yoursite.dev with your site directory)
• Make ngrok configuration active by symlinking it: sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/ngrok.dev /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ngrok.dev
• Restart nginx by doing sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
• Start ngrok service with: ngrok :80

Postgresql

Postgresql service is not running automatically on boot by default. You can run it manually by doing sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start. You can disable mysql service if it's not in use, to save up some server resources.

Troubleshoot

• If you use Windows as host OS, disable NFS since it's not supported: edit Vagrantfile and set nfs => false. On OSX NFS gives much better shared folders performance.