Vagrant box Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP

Make a Vagrant box with Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP stack, plus configure it for development, plus install Python, Ruby, Rails, Node.js, Codeception, Java, Selenium, headless Chrome browser.

• Host: Linux or Mac.
• Guest: Ubuntu 18.04, Apache 2.4, MariaDB 10.3, PHP 7.2, Git 2.18.

Summary

In host terminal:

mkdir -p ~/vm && cd $_
git clone https://github.com/stemar/vagrant-ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails.git ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails
cd ~/vm/ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails
vagrant up --provision
vagrant ssh

Goals

• Use a clean Ubuntu 18.04 box available from Bento with 64GB HDD virtual space.
• Leave code and version control files physically outside the VM while virtually accessing them inside the VM.
• Use any GUI tool outside the VM to access data inside the VM.
  • IDEs, browsers, database administration applications, Git clients
• Use http://localhost:8002 in a browser outside the VM to access Apache inside the VM.
• Use the same SSH keys inside and outside VM.
• Use the same Git config inside and outside VM.
• Have Vagrantfile and its provision file be located anywhere on your host machine, independently of your projects location.
• Use ~ as /home/vagrant inside the VM for the location of synchronized directories.
  • Disable the default /vagrant synchronized to Vagrantfile's location.
• Use Bash for provisioning.
  • Every developer will know Bash; not every developer will know Ansible, Chef and Puppet.
  • You could copy/paste the Bash commands if you configured a VirtualBox manually without Vagrant.
• Use MariaDB and Adminer without a password for username root.
• Use Apache .conf files outside the VM to customize the web server configuration inside the VM.
• Use rbenv to install Ruby.
• Use bundler to install Rails.

Prerequisites

Vagrant and Oracle VM VirtualBox installed

• VirtualBox 6.0.10
• VirtualBox 6.0.10 Extension Pack
• VirtualBox Guest Additions
• Vagrant 2.2.5

Look at all VirtualBox downloads here

VirtualBox Guest Additions Vagrant plugin installed

https://github.com/dotless-de/vagrant-vbguest

In host terminal:

vagrant plugin update
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

SSH keys already set on host machine

In host terminal:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

And maybe:

cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
cat ~/.ssh/config
cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts

Git already configured on host machine

In host terminal:

cat ~/.gitconfig

Start here

In host terminal:

mkdir -p ~/vm && cd $_
git clone https://github.com/stemar/vagrant-ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails.git ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails

You can have more than one vagrant dirtree under the ~/vm directory.
Ex.: git clone https://github.com/stemar/vagrant-centos-7-6.git centos-7-6

Separate VMs dirtree

Vagrant supports the definition of multiple VMs inside one Vagrantfile, but if I separate my VMs by LAMP stack in a dirtree, I can run, maintain and troubleshoot them independently.

• I can have a smaller, focused Vagrantfile for each VM.
• I can have LAMP-specific config files to help the provision file.
• .vagrant is created independently within each VM directory.
• I can open separate tabs in my terminal, cd into separate VM dirtrees and vagrant up/vagrant halt without having to write the machine name: vagrant up ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails/vagrant halt ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails
• vagrant global-status still works as intended to see all VMs on the host machine.
• I change the HTTP and MySQL ports in Vagrantfile to avoid collisions and Vagrant errors at provisioning.

adminer.php

We want root with no password in our VM to avoid writing a password zillions of time we access MySQL inside the VM. Of course, you would have a root password on a server but this is a virtual machine hosted locally.

As of version 4.6.3, Adminer is blocking any user with no password. To allow root with no password, config/adminer.php is created.

php.ini file

We don't want to edit php.ini directly but we want to add a development-related custom set of php.ini overrides.

PHP doesn't allow the loading of a custom php.ini file to override its own settings (except when PHP is installed as CGI which is not the case here).

We have to do it with .htaccess at the /var/www level; see PHP configuration settings

Provision ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails

You will see many red line warnings from apt-get during provisioning but let the script finish, most of them are not fatal errors.

You can prepend the vagrant up command with these environment variables or you can edit Vagrantfile.

SYNC_DIR

Add the environment variable SYNC_DIR with your own path name under your home directory. Name it the same name to reduce confusion. Ex.: if the host machine has ~/projects a.k.a. /Users/stemar/projects, the guest machine will have ~/projects, a.k.a. /home/vagrant/projects.

In host terminal:

cd ~/vm/ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails
SYNC_DIR=projects vagrant up --provision

PORT_80

Add the environment variable PORT_80 with a port number to redirect to. Ex.: redirect port 80 to port 8080.

In host terminal:

cd ~/vm/ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails
PORT_80=8080 vagrant up --provision

PORT_3306

Add the environment variable PORT_3306 with a port number to redirect to. Ex.: redirect port 3306 to port 33061.

In host terminal:

cd ~/vm/ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails
PORT_80=8080 PORT_3306=33061 vagrant up --provision

If you get this error after VirtualBox Guest Additions plugin changed versions

Vagrant was unable to mount VirtualBox shared folders. This is usually
because the filesystem "vboxsf" is not available. This filesystem is
made available via the VirtualBox Guest Additions and kernel module.
Please verify that these guest additions are properly installed in the
guest. This is not a bug in Vagrant and is usually caused by a faulty
Vagrant box. For context, the command attempted was:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 home_vagrant_vm /home/vagrant/vm

The error output from the command was:

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device

Halt the box and redo up

vagrant halt
SYNC_DIR=projects vagrant up --provision

If something goes wrong

In host terminal:

vagrant halt -f
OR
vagrant destroy -f
AND
SYNC_DIR=projects vagrant up --provision

Log in ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails

In host terminal:

vagrant ssh

Prompt inside ubuntu-18-04-tests-rails

In guest terminal:

vagrant@ubuntu-18-04:~$

Checks

Test ll alias and show .bashrc

In guest terminal:

ll
...
cat ~/.bashrc

Check MariaDB root no password

In guest terminal:

mysql -u root
MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW DATABASES; quit;

Check Apache

In guest terminal:

cat /etc/hosts
cat /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
cat /etc/apache2/envvars
ll /etc/apache2/conf-available
ll /etc/apache2/conf-enabled
ll /etc/apache2/sites-available
ll /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
cat /etc/apache2/conf-available/localhost.conf
cat /etc/apache2/sites-available/virtualhost.conf
cat /etc/apache2/conf-available/adminer.conf
apachectl -V
apachectl configtest
curl -I localhost

Result:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...

In host browser:

http://localhost:8002

You see the "Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page".

Check your domain

Ex.: Replace example.com with your domain and the port number with your custom redirect number.

In host browser:

http://example.com.localhost:8002

You see the home page.

Check Adminer

In guest terminal:

curl -I localhost/adminer.php

Result:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...

In host browser:

http://localhost:8002/adminer.php

• Username: root
• Password: leave empty

---

References

• Vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com
• Vagrant troubleshooting: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki-Vagrant#Troubleshooting_startup
• Oracle VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
• Oracle VirtualBox Guest Additions: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html
• Ubuntu: https://www.ubuntu.com
• Bento box: https://app.vagrantup.com/bento/boxes/ubuntu-18.04
• Bento GitHub: https://github.com/chef/bento
• https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/install-apache-with-php-and-mysql-on-ubuntu-18-04-lamp
• https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-mariadb-on-ubuntu-18-04