MageOps Vagrant Boxes

This repository contains the sources that are used to automatically build, update and publish Vagrant base boxes for local development purposes.

If you're curious what it's all about then start with the mageops/magesuite box.

Boxes

All of the boxes are published to MageOps at Vagrant Cloud!

The boxes are made for the VirtualBox¹ provider as it's the most easy, supported and widely-used one.

Thanks to Vagrant getting started is as easy as two commands:

vagrant init mageops/centos
vagrant up

¹ It's not tested yet, but all VirtualBox boxes store the machines in OVF format and thus should work in VMWare by extension.

📦 mageops/centos - optimized CentOS 7

Performance-boosted CentOS 7 system extending the official box.

🚀 Improvements in relation to the the original box

• Up-to-date packages¹
• Common CLI tools preinstalled
• Disk resized to 100GB
• Swap partition on a dedicated fixed sized writethrough disk
• Storage controller upgraded to SCSI (from IDE) for a huge ⚡️ IO boost²
• All disks have host caching, discard, and SSD emulation enabled by default³
• Faster boot - boot only from disk, other options disabled
• Paravirtualized Network (virtio-net) devices for better network performance
• Kernel upgrade: stable mainline kernel (5.6 branch)
• IO scheduler changed to deadline-mq which better fits the expected workload
• All CPU Bug mitigations off in the guest
• VirtualBox VM performance-enhacing features enabled (e.g. speculation control)
• Memory usage optimization via zswap (default conservative settings)
• Audio support disabled as it causes many problems on macOS
• Up-to-date VirtualBox Guest Additions with runtime auto-update
  • Guest Additions DVD is inserted automatically on vagrant up (via default Vagrantfile)
  • Guest system service installs the additions if the DVD is detected at boot

These choices are based on comparison benchmarking⁴, expertise and experience.

¹ Box is rebuilt automatically periodically with yum update each time.

² Benchmarked up to 2GB/s IO speed in comparison to 80MB/s locked rate with IDE.

³ As 99% of today's workstations use SDD/NVMe drives this settings should extend the life of your machine's drive (TRIM), improve performance and possibly enable better compaction of the virtual disk images (not sure about VBox support).

⁴ All testing has been done on macOS host as this is what we primarily use at creativestyle for developer workstations.

🗓 Still a few things left todo

• Improve NFS share performance
  • Note: It might even work better than unison if set up properly on host and guest
    • Recently many articles appeared that are reporting superb NFS file sharing performance although it depends on configuration details and possibly requires latest software.
  • Check if NFS over UDP improves perf
  • Check if NFSv4 is better or worse
  • Set up CacheFS with performance-optimized settings on guest
    • Many improvements and possibilities thanks to newer kernel
  • Ensure proper macOS host settings (see what Vagrant does OOTH)
    • macOS export should have mapall directive that squashes the owner to the logged in user's UID/GID (501:20 by default)
    • noresvport option might be needed
    • check nfs.conf settings (enable nfs.server.async?)
  • Make sure NFS locking (nfslockd) communication is set up and working properly so we can avoid many strange problems
  • Squash owner to magento user on guest

📦 mageops/raccoon - Packaged Magento Development Environment

🚧 Work in progress - not yet available, stay tuned.

Built on top of mageops/centos.

This box is automatically provisioned with MageOps Ansible Infrastructure to provide all software needed to run Magento locally in a state-of-the-art setup resembling our production architecture as closely as possibly while providing many conveniences suited for local development.

Provisioning Notes

Note: We could use the Ansible Vagrant provisioner but it actually cannot handle our custom MageOps setup and it really doesn't provide any tangible benefit in this case. Better to use a shell provisioner with a simple script that bootstraps the Ansible env and runs the playbook...

0. Set up global MAGEOPS_ environment variables via system profile. So provisioning/raccoon can detect it's running in Vagrant/VBox VM and act accordingly (skip local key authorization, etc.)
   • MAGEOPS_ENV_TYPE=vagrant
   • MAGEOPS_ENV_PLATFORM=virtualbox
1. clone ansible infrastructure to /opt/mageops/ansible
2. clone vagrant/raccon vars into /opt/mageops/ansilbe/vars/project
3. set up inventory that has vagrant as localhost with ansible_connection=local
4. install python3 and python3-virtualenv
5. create virtualenv in /opt/mageops/ansible/virtualenv
6. [in venv] install python reqs pip install -r requirements-python.txt
7. [in venv] install ansible reqs ansible-galaxy install -r requirements-galaxy.yml -p roles
8. [in venv] run vagrant provisioning playbook
9. ...
10. ... profit!!!

Idea: Run raccoon PHP CLI inside the VM...

📦 mageops/magesuite - Preinstalled Demo Magento Shop with MageSuite

🚧 Work in progress - not yet available, stay tuned.

Built on top of mageops/raccoon.

The Raccoon box with a demo shop installed and configured. Use it to check out MageSuite or just kickstart your development environment.

Provisioning notes

1. set up auth.json for repo.magento.com
2. composer create-project --repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-community-edition:2.3.4
3. composer require creativestyle/magesuite
4. run ansible provisioning for magento configuration with sample data installation
5. remove auth.json !!!
6. remove composer cache
7. test - do a few curls from host to make sure the shop is up and working