Backdrop Development VM

For Backdrop 1.x.

This project aims to make spinning up a simple local Backdrop test/development environment incredibly quick and easy, and to introduce new developers to the wonderful world of Backdrop development on local virtual machines.

It will install the following on an Ubuntu 14.04 linux VM:

• Apache 2.4.x
• PHP 5.5.x (configurable)
• MySQL 5.5.x
• Drush latest release (configurable)
• Backdrop 1.x
• Optional (installed by default):
  • Apache Solr 4.10.x (configurable)
  • Memcached
  • XHProf, for profiling your code
  • XDebug, for debugging your code
  • PHPMyAdmin, for accessing databases directly
  • MailHog, for catching and debugging email

It should take 5-10 minutes to build or rebuild the VM from scratch on a decent broadband connection.

Please read through the rest of this README.

Customizing the VM

There are a couple places where you can customize the VM for your needs:

• config.yml: Contains variables like the VM domain name and IP address, PHP and MySQL configuration, etc.
• backdrop.make.yml: Contains configuration for the Backdrop core version.

Quick Start Guide

This Quick Start Guide will help you quickly build a Backdrop 1.x site on the Backdrop VM.

1 - Install dependencies (VirtualBox, Vagrant, Ansible)

1. Download and install VirtualBox
2. Download and install Vagrant.
3. [Mac/Linux only] Install Ansible.

Note for Windows users: Ansible will be installed inside the VM, and everything will be configured internally (unlike on Mac/Linux hosts). See JJG-Ansible-Windows for more information.

Note for Linux users: If NFS is not already installed on your host, you will need to install it to use the default NFS synced folder configuration. See guides for Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, and RHEL/CentOS.

2 - Build the Virtual Machine

1. Download this project and put it wherever you want.
2. Make copies of both of the example.* files, and modify to your liking: - Copy example.backdrop.make.yml to backdrop.make.yml. - Copy example.config.yml to config.yml.
3. Create a local directory where Backdrop will be installed and configure the path to that directory in config.yml (local_path, inside vagrant_synced_folders).
4. Open Terminal, cd to this directory (containing the Vagrantfile and this README file).
5. [Mac/Linux only] Install Ansible Galaxy roles required for this VM: $ sudo ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.txt
6. Type in vagrant up, and let Vagrant do its magic.

Note: If there are any errors during the course of running vagrant up, and it drops you back to your command prompt, just run vagrant provision to continue building the VM from where you left off. If there are still errors after doing this a few times, post an issue to this project's issue queue on GitHub with the error.

3 - Configure your host machine to access the VM.

1. Edit your hosts file, adding the line 192.168.88.111 backdrop.dev so you can connect to the VM. (Alternatively, you can install a Vagrant plugin to automatically add and remove the entry from your hosts file; run vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater).
2. Open your browser and access http://backdrop.dev/. This will bring you to the Backdrop installer.

Extra software/utilities

By default, this VM includes the extras listed in the config.yml option installed_extras:

installed_extras:
  - mailhog
  - memcached
  - phpmyadmin
  - solr
  - xdebug
  - xhprof

If you don't want or need one or more of these extras, just delete them or comment them from the list. This is helpful if you want to reduce PHP memory usage or otherwise conserve system resources.

Other Notes

• To shut down the virtual machine, enter vagrant halt in the Terminal in the same folder that has the Vagrantfile. To destroy it completely (if you want to save a little disk space, or want to rebuild it from scratch with vagrant up again), type in vagrant destroy.
• When you rebuild the VM (e.g. vagrant destroy and then another vagrant up), make sure you clear out the contents of the backdrop folder on your host machine, or Backdrop will return some errors when the VM is rebuilt (it won't reinstall Backdrop cleanly).
• Find out more about local development with Vagrant + VirtualBox + Ansible in this presentation: Local Development Environments - Vagrant, VirtualBox and Ansible.
• Learn about how Ansible can accelerate your ability to innovate and manage your infrastructure by reading Ansible for DevOps.

Credit

This Backdrop/Vagrant VM is a fork of [Jeff Geerling's Drupal VM] (https://github.com/geerlingguy/drupal-vm)

Jeff Geerling, owner of Midwestern Mac, LLC, created this project in 2014 so he could accelerate his Drupal core and contrib development workflow. This project, and others like it, are also featured as examples in Jeff's book, Ansible for DevOps.