IMMA FIX IT!

For you poor souls who are stuck on Windows or a super old Mac Mini, or otherwise are struggling with getting your environment set up, I've made you an Ubuntu 18.04 image with most of the goodies built in!

This installation includes the following:

• NodeJS
• NPM
• NVM
• PostgreSQL
• MongoDB
• Docker

It lets your host OS access ports 3000, 5432, 8000, 8080, and 27017, which should cover most of your cases, but you may need to manually edit the Vagrantfile if you need more ports available.

I'm planning to add the following as I continue to build up the box, but haven't installed them yet:

• Kubernetes
• (some CLI utils?)
• (my own .vimrc?)

What is this?

A VM (Virtual Machine) is a way to use resources from your computer as a mini-computer. You can imagine dedicating some portion of the CPU/RAM/HDD on your machine to run as if it were a separate machine. This has myriad benefits and a variety of applications across the world of software engineering.

In this case, we've got a little VM that runs Ubuntu 18.04, one of the most common Linux distributions out there. I've tested it on OSX 10.15, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 16.04 without issue.

A few of these benefits:

• security - if you're not sure if an app is unsafe, you can run it in a VM so that if it screws anything up, it'll just break the emulated computer, and not spread to the rest of your machine
• compatibility - this is the main reason for creating this repo; People develop on different machines, and some of them are pretty screwed up. Older Mac Minis won't support the newest version of NodeJS. The Windows filesystem syntax is a little different than UNIX, which screws up filesystem operations. Setting up a local database on Windows can also be a big pain.
• configuration - I can give you a completely independent, pre-configured machine, so we don't have to fuss about whether we have the right environment set up. Sometimes you start messing with your registry, or other files to get a very specific program to work, but don't realize it breaks other software on your machine, at which point it becomes a nightmare to debug. It's also a nice perk if you're working on multiple machines and want to have things consistent across all of them.
• distributed computing - We can actually run multiple VMs on one machine, enabling us to emulate a cluster, or just horizontally scale our app by spinning up more instances of the same thing.
• easy recovery - If the machine gets trashed, you can easily rebuild it from an image, minimizing your setup hassles.

Installation

1. Install Vagrant
2. Install Virtualbox
3. clone down this repo git clone https://github.com/tttaaannnggg/webvm.git
4. cd into the cloned folder (named webvm)
5. run vagrant up and wait for everything to install

Usage

1. enter the webvm folder that you cloned down from this repo
2. if you're in the folder with the Vagrantfile, vagrant up will initialize your VM, enabling you to connect to it. This may take a minute.
3. once the previous operation is done, run vagrant ssh, and you'll be presented with a terminal. it should print something like Wecome to Ubuntu 18.04, and change your prompt to vagrant@ubuntu-bionic

Using MongoDB

At the moment, there are two ways to make MongoDB accessible to the host OS. I'll figure out how to automate it later.

• You can run mongod with --bind_ip 0.0.0.0, as sudo mongod --bind_ip 0.0.0.0, or sudo mongod --bind_ip_all
• You can edit the configuration file stored at /etc/mongodb.conf. Look for the bindIp option and replace the 127.0.0.1 with 0.0.0.0, then sudo mongod -f /etc/mongodb.conf

Accessing your files

There is a specific folder that is shared between the guest (virtual) OS, and the host (main) OS. On the host OS, you simply need to go to the webvm folder, and you'll see the shared stuff. On the VM, you'll be able to access the same folder at /vagrant/ (i.e. cd /vagrant/)

Suggested Workflow

The workflow I propose is something like this:

1. start your VM with vagrant up
2. put your projects in the webvm folder (this will be shared between the host OS and the VM)
3. when you're ready to run your project, run vagrant ssh
4. inside of your VM, cd /vagrant to get into the shared folder
5. Also in your VM, cd into your project folder and run your commands (npm start or node or whatever else)
6. when you're done, run sudo shutdown -h now to kill your running VM

TL;DR: do all your editing on your host OS, but run stuff within the VM for that sweet, sweet compatibility.