painless wordpress dev environments with vagrant and ansible

Painless WordPress Development Environments with Vagrant and Ansible

October 7, 2014

You need a server

Rogue Repairman Productions | Alexandria, VA | [email protected] | 703-542-4025

The Problem

● If you're building Web applications, you can't do your work without a server

● But where should that server be?● In other words, where should you be doing your work?

mailto:[email protected]


Making Do

● PHP's built-in web server?● Installing everything locally?● WAMP?● Staging server?● Directly on the production server?


“There's got to be a better way!”


What Makes A Good Dev Environment?

A good development environment should be...● Private● Homogeneous● Repeatable● Easy



A Better Way



Three Tools

● VirtualBox: virtualization software● Vagrant: encapsulates virtual environments● Ansible: easy configuration management



Lock-in? Nah

These tools don't just work with each other – others can be swapped in where appropriate

● VMWare, Docker, Amazon EC2● Real hardware, EC2, commodity VPSes● Chef, Puppet, Salt



So Why Choose These Three Tools?

They offer an appealing combination of:● Power● Desktop utility● Ease of use



VirtualBox

What is it? General-purpose virtualization software

● Can guest anything that runs on x86/AMD64: Windows, OS X, Linux, BeOS, MS-DOS, OS/2...

● Can host on Linux, Windows, OS X, or Solaris



VirtualBox



Vagrant

What is it? A tool for encapsulating virtual environments

● Specify standard configurations for virtual machines...

● … then use Vagrant to bundle them all up in a clean, ready to go state

● Then you can roll out new instances of them just by copying a few text files



Ansible

What is it? A tool for orchestrating machine configurations

● Create and run recipes that take you from bare OS to fully configured system

● Install software● Change configuration files● Create, modify and remove users and

permissions● Do anything you can do from the command line


Let's get to work


Step 1: The “Base Box”

● A packaged-up VirtualBox VM with operating system (and sometimes other software) already installed

● Download from Vagrant Cloud, directly from vendors, or roll your own

● You can then share your own boxes with others



Vagrant Cloud



Step 2: The Vagrantfile

● A Ruby script that controls the configuration of the virtual machine

● Base box to start with● Networking setup● Available memory, CPU, disk● Synchronized folders● Which “provisioner” to use, and where to find its configuration files



Inside the Vagrantfile



Step 3: The Inventory File

● Tells Ansible which machines you want to run your provisioning scripts against

● In our case, it's just one machine, the local VM

● Specified in the Vagrantfile as ansible.inventory_path● Can also specify variables to pass to your Ansible “recipe” for

system setup



Inside The Inventory File



Step 4: The Playbook

● A text file in YAML format, telling Ansible step by step how to provision your system

● What's YAML? http://www.yaml.org/

● Each “play” in the playbook represents an action to be taken● Playbooks can be nested, so they can be developed as discrete

components ● Plays are (supposed to be) idempotent, so you can run them

multiple times without side effects


http://www.yaml.org/


Inside the Playbook


Putting It All Together: A Case Study


VirtualBox + Vagrant + Ansible == WordPress

● To aid in my own work, I have created a set of scripts that let you rapidly deploy a fully functional WordPress environment on your local workstation

● It's on GitHub for your forking pleasure● https://github.com/jalefkowit/Vagrant-Ansible-Wordpress

● But you could do the same thing for Drupal, Symfony, Laravel, MediaWiki... whatever you want

● Learning these tools let you speed past futzing with system administration and get back to what you do best: writing beautiful PHP


https://github.com/jalefkowit/Vagrant-Ansible-Wordpress


Thank You!

Jason A. LefkowitzPresident, Rogue Repairman Productions

http://roguerepairman.com

[email protected]

Technology sucks. We make it suck less.


http://roguerepairman.com/


painless wordpress dev environments with vagrant and ansible

Technology

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virtual environments

ansible recipe

vagrant cloud

tools virtualbox

virtualbox vm

staging server

production server