A simplistic Vagrant devops environment for starting any sort of web development project that will run on CentOS or RedHat Enterprise Linux/RHEL, and do so with Ansible for provisioning. Uses Librarian-Ansible to handle downloading Ansible roles.
Need more roles? Add them to the Ansiblefile. Call them in the playbook.
This is totally a work in progress, use at your own risk.
As proof that this environment is capable of doing something useful, out of the box it sets up an instance of the UCLA Library's Californica Samvera/Hyrax application, including all required services. Vagrant-Embark is certainly not only a Rails development/devops environment, you can use it to test any collection of Ansible roles to stand up any sort of web application you might prefer. Think of the Californica application as a working demo.
- Virtualization support must be enabled, if you have a BIOS-based computer (aka a PC).
- Vagrant version 1.9.2 or above.
- VirtualBox
- (Optional) A GitHub account with an associated SSH key. This is NOT required, but if you plan to do development with this project and/or create Pull Requests, it is recommended. If you have a local SSH agent running (or Pageant/PuTTY on Windows, or the OSX Keychain with a saved passphrase), Vagrant will attempt to automatically forward your local SSH key(s) to the VM, so that you will be able to immediately interact with GitHub via SSH on the VM. However, if you are not running a key agent, even if your SSH key does not have a passphrase, Vagrant will not prompt you to enter your passphrase, it will simply fail to run all the provisioning processes. We urge you to consider running a key agent with your SSH key, it will make your life so much more simple.
- WARNING: If you are using an SSH key, we highly recommend that you use an RSA key.
No, this project uses the Ansible Local Provisioner for Vagrant. That means Ansible is installed and run from the guest VM. You only need the above-mentioned requirements.
Ensure you have the Vagrant-ENV plugin installed (see below, there are other plugin recommendations), clone this repository, cd to the root of it, then copy the .env.sample file to a new file called .env, and modify it to suit your requirements. You may select either a CentOS base box, or you can use a RHEL base box. If you opt for a RHEL base box, you will also need to provide your RHN credentials in your .env file. The box will not provision correctly without these credentials. For CentOS, no RHN credentials are required, and should not be provided.
If you'd like to minimize the time you spend provisioning, you may utilize the Embark-base machine, a base box image I've made which has already run most of the Ansible roles. The Vagrantfile will only run the shortcut-build playbook, if you elect to use the embark-base machine as a base box. If you're curious, here's the Vagrant project which builds the embark-base machine. An example of how to specifiy this box in the .env file is provided in the .env.sample file.
After preparing your .env file, standard Vagrant protocol applies: be sure you're in the top level folder of this project, and run
vagrant up
All services provisioned on this VM are bound to a routable interface, so you can access them at the private IP address assigned as Vagrant boots up the VM. Unless you change it, it's 192.168.33.33. If you have any of Vagrant's local domain resolution plugins installed, you should be able to reach the local Californica app at https://embark.vagrant.test/ ... its fedora at http://embark.vagrant.test:8081/fcrepo/rest ... and its Solr at http://embark.vagrant.test:8983
Vagrant has a robust community of plugin developers, and some of the plugins are quite nice. Installing a Vagrant plugin is simple.
... OK, fine, run this command to install a few Vagrant plugins...
vagrant plugin install vagrant-env vagrant-registration vagrant-hostsupdater... but, you'll really have a better time if you also run this command to install a few more plugins...
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest vagrant-cachier vagrant-notify vagrant-spec
- Vagrant-ENV is required, in order to use this project.
- Vagrant-registration is strongly recommended, if you elect to use a RedHat base VM image. It does not successfully register your VM with RHN, we use a shell script to handle the actual registration, however, it does still work to unregister your VM when you halt or destroy it, which is a nice convenience, and worth installing the plugin.
The following Vagrant plugins are not required, but they do make using Vagrant more enjoyable.
- Vagrant-Hostsupdater (or any of the local domain resolution plugins you might prefer)
- Vagrant-VBGuest - Highly Recommended for VirtualBox as it keeps VirtualBox Guest Additions up to date
- Vagrant-Cachier - Caches packages between VMs. (Project now unmaintained, see URL)
- Vagrant-Notify
- Vagrant-Spec
If you have installed the Vagrant-Spec plugin, after you run vagrant up and it completes sucessfully, then run vagrant spec test. You can add more tests as you need them, and then re-run vagrant spec test to run them.
I've borrowed freely from the following projects:
- Vagrant-DSpace (a bunch of shell provisioners)
- Double-p/smtf-test (inspiration for the Ansible Local provisioner layout)
- Geerlingguy's Ansible-Vagrant Examples