Get started with local development

Preliminary setup

• Install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
  • If you're on Windows START VirtualBox AS ADMINISTRATOR
• Install Vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
  • If you're on Windows START Vagrant AS ADMINISTRATOR i.e. run vagrant up in a shell that was started as administrator
• Create a new directory where you want to handle local development (I'll use the tilde ("~") symbol to represent this directory going forward)
• Open a command line at that new directory (the one we're calling "~").
• Clone the repo using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/mattpearce85/local-perl.git . you can download Git here if you don't already have it: https://git-scm.com/downloads

• Now that we have the local environment repository on our machine we can execute the following commands:

vagrant up this will take a few minutes the first time...

vagrant ssh this opens an ssh command line within the virtual machine

• Once ssh'd into the virtual machine, execute the following commands to install Docker:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"

sudo apt update

sudo apt install docker-ce

docker -v this verifies that Docker is installed properly

• Now install Docker Compose:

sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.21.2/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

docker-compose --version this verifies that Docker Compose is installed properly

Starting and stopping the local server resources

• Execute the following commands to start up the local server resources

cd /vagrant /vagrant is mapped to the directory you ran "vagrant up" in (aka "~"), it also houses your web root and everything else

sudo docker-compose up -d this will take a few minutes the first time...

• If you want to shut down the local server resources, execute the following command

sudo docker-compose down

Working with Perl

Running Perl in the command line

• Make sure your local server resources are running using the docker-compose command above
• If you're not ssh'd into vagrant, open a command line where you cloned the repo and run the following command:

vagrant ssh

• Now you're logged into the vagrant virtual machine, but Perl is running within Docker container on our virtual machine, so we need to run another command to get to the command line inside the Perl Docker container. It's like command line Inception!

sudo docker exec -it perl bash

• Now we've jumped into the virtual machine, and jumped deeper still into the Perl Docker container. We should be ready to run Perl scripts from the command-line. For example, execute the following command to run our Perl file:

perl index.pl

• This command runs the Perl compiler on the specified file. In this case, the file just outputs some HTML code. The command line doesn't interpret HTML, so it's just plain text. How about running it in a web browser?

Running Perl in the web browser

• Make sure your local server resources are running using the docker-compose command above
• Open your web browser to http://perl.localhost/index.pl
• Let's edit that Perl code... Open the following file from the cloned repo in your IDE or a text editor. It will be somewhere like: ~/webroot/index.pl
• Make some changes, save the file, and then refresh your web browser. Do you see your changes? Good!

Creating a MySQL database for your application

• Make sure your servers are running and then open your browser to http://pma.localhost
• Login using the username root and the password mysqltemp
• If you're not already at the phpMyAdmin dashboard, click the logo
• Click the User Accounts tab at the top
• Click the Add user account tab midway down the page
• Set User name equal to your project name and click the Generate button to get a password.
• Copy the password to notepad or something, we'll need it next
• Check the box for Create database with same name and grant all privileges.
• Scroll down and click the Go button in the bottom-right corner
• The database is now ready

Other stuff

Server-related commands you might need

• Reloading nginx (such as after updating a configuration file):

sudo docker exec -it nginx sh Start a shell prompt in the nginx service (must be ssh'd into vagrant)

nginx -s reload reloads nginx

• Restarting the local server resources (such as after doing a git pull on this repo):

sudo docker-compose down

sudo docker-compose up -d