This is a simple test I did to see if you can run JRebel in combination with vagrant.
The goal was to setup a development environment where I can code in a familiar environment (Eclipse, MacOS X) while running my code in a vagrant- and **puppet-**controlled, server like environment, in this case CentOS. All this while still enjoying the benefints of JRebel - Zero downtime, code-save-reload etc.
Since I can't redistribute JRebel you will have to do some changes here.
Replace the empty file jrebel.jar with your real copy of jrebel.jar. You can find the file under provision/modules/tomcat7/files/jrebel/jrebel-dist/jrebel.jar.
You will also need to edit the file provision/modules/tomcat7/files/jrebel/jrebel-dist/jrebel.properties to suit your environment.
Once these two changes are done you should be able to import the project into eclipse (or any other IDE) and look at the code. There's not much code to be seen though. So when you're done looking at it you can boot up a machine.
$ vagrant up dev
Once the machine is up you can try to access http://127.0.0.1:8080/jrebel-vagrant. You should see some rather boring output there. Try changing the servlet class SillyServlet.java and reload the page. Changes should be immediate. No redeploy.
I'm not a master of puppet. The puppet manifests & modules included in this repo are probably considered rather crufty. What I have attempted to do is to show that it is possible to keep development and production stuff in the same code repository. This was handy for a short in-house demo of the concept.
I've tried to create a really simple tomcat module. It can install tomcat and deploy applications that's all. That's usually all I want to do.
This seems to work as intended! By using the shared folder between the vagrant VM and the host, JRebel is able to pick up any code changes performed in Eclipse.
So I get all the benefits from all the tools. No real drawbacks found so far. One possible drawback could be that each time you provision a new VM you will probably checkout a license seat from the JRebel license server.... :-)
You should probably check out JRebel Remoting for a similar, but better, approach. http://zeroturnaround.com/software/jrebel/learn/remoting/