The document discusses the challenges of traditional prepackaged development environments and highlights the benefits of using Vagrant and Ansible for local development. Vagrant facilitates the easy creation and management of virtual machines, while Ansible simplifies automation and configuration management without complex scripting. It also provides instructions for setting up a CentOS development environment using these tools, as well as considerations for Windows users.

1. Local Development
Environments
Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Ansible
Jeff Geerling

2. Prepackaged environments
•
Traditional prepackaged development stacks:
•
Apache, MySQL, PHP (WAMP/MAMP)
•
Java/Tomcat
•
Ruby/Rails

3. Prepackaged environments
•
Difficulties:
•
Real-world environments are more complex
•
Single stack for multiple/different projects
•
Prod server differences cause bugs
•
Hard to configure
•
“Snowflakes”

4. WAMP/MAMP/non-VM
“But it works on my
machine!”
(we’re going to solve this problem)

5. VM-based development
•
VM (Virtual Machine):
•
Match prod closely
•
Configure to heart’s content
•
Destroy and rebuild if broken
•
BUT, annoying to hand-configure
(not an out-of-the-box solution)
+
+
+

7. Vagrant
•
Created to solve difficulties of VM-based
development
•
Bring up, destroy, rebuild VMs with ease
•
Simple Ruby configuration file (Vagrantfile)
•
Can define single-server or multi-server
production-like environments

9. Ansible
•
Born out of frustration with complexities and
limitations of existing CM solutions like Puppet
•
“A powerful automation engine that makes
systems and apps simple to deploy. No more
scripting. No custom code. No agents required.
Just get in and get it done.”
•
Easy idempotence <— I like!

10. Simple, Repeatable VMs
+
+
(or)
- shell scripts
- puppet
- chef
- salt

11. Let’s see how this works
•
We’re going to:
•
Create a 64-bit CentOS 6.4 VM with Vagrant
•
Configure the VM with Ansible
•
Run the VM inside VirtualBox
(all free and open source, by the way…)

12. Notes on Windows
•
Preference for POSIX-based systems (OS X, Linux,
etc.)… since that’s where everything is deployed
anyways
•
Windows sometimes often requires hand-holding
•
Example: Ansible doesn’t run (easily) on Windows,
so it’s run from within VM.
•
Shared folders are slow. Might need to us
CIFS/Samba on Windows (similar to NFS on
Mac/Linux).

13. Getting Started
•
Install VirtualBox
•
Install Vagrant
•
Install Ansible:
$ sudo pip install ansible
(like I said, difficult on Windows, even with Cygwin)

14. Build a CentOS VM
$ vagrant box add centos64 <url>
$ vagrant init centos64
$ vagrant up
• Done!

15. Provision the VM
• Add
to the Vagrantfile that was just created:
config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"
ansible.sudo = true
end
• Then
create playbook.yml:
--- hosts: all
tasks:
- yum: pkg=httpd state=installed

16. Provision the VM
•
To run the provisioner:
vagrant provision
•
Done!

18. Slightly More Realistic
--# Configure basic CentOS LAMP stack.
- hosts: all
tasks:
- name: Install Dependencies.
yum: src={{ items }} state=installed
with_items:
- httpd
- mysql
- mysql-server
- php
- php-common
- etc…
- name: Copy Apache configuration file.
template: src=templates/httpd.conf dest=/etc/httpd/httpd.conf
- name: Ensure Apache is running and starts at boot.
service: name=httpd state=started enabled=yes

19. Provisioning on Windows
•
Shell script provisioning works on Windows
•
Use shell script to set up Ansible dependencies,
then run Ansible playbook from within VM:
config.vm.provision "shell" do |sh|
sh.path = "windows.sh"
sh.args = "playbook.yml inventory"
end
•
Since it’s Ruby, you can use ruby if/else for which
provisioner to use, with RbConfig::CONFIG['host_os']

20. Provisioning on Windows
•
See: Running Ansible within Windows
•
See: JJG-Ansible-Windows

21. Resources
•
Ansible documentation
•
Vagrant documentation
•
Ansible for Devops (book in progress)