Building Development Environments With Vagrant

Vagrant

• Easy automation for Virtual Machines
• Supports many platforms and virtualization technologies
• Integrates with cloud providers
• Supports system automation tools, specifically Puppet and Chef
• Lots more...
• http://www.vagrantup.com/

Why use Virtual Machines for Development?

• Keep your dependencies contained
• Run your code on other machines more easily
• Reproduce your production stack
• Reproduce your CI environment
• Use it in your CI environment

I knew all this already

• VMs have been used for development enironments for ages
• We already do this!

How can we do it better?

Use configuration management tools

• Set up your application in minutes, not hours
• Standardize stack across all developers
• Simulate production evironments, from bare metal to PaaS providers

Use configuration management tools

• Set up really complicated dependencies (Data Stores, Language Runtimes, C libraries, Operating Systems)
• And tests (Selenium, client/server integrations)
• Easily test new versions of them

What I like about Puppet

• Declarative
• Graph-based dependency resolution
• Lots of well maintained modules for popular things

Puppet Modules

• Are maintained b both Puppet Labs and the community at large
• Allow dangerous levels of configuration abstraction
• Might not be suitable for your production use
• But might be just the ticket for development

A Really Contrived Demo

Tips and Caveats

• Git submodules seem like the easiest way of managing Puppet module dependencies, but they are still git submodules
• If things get too complicated, a package dependencya nd a config file might be enough

The Future

• Use Vagrant to produce your build artifact
  • VM Image
  • Docker Container

Links

• Vagrant
• Puppet Labs on Github

FIN

Noah Adams

noah@mobify.com