Repeatable Development Environments

Wanted to talk briefly today about repeatable development environments. Repeatability is a very good trait for a development environment to have. I have been plagued for years and years of not giving myself a way to repeatably build a development environment. We get lazy right? You get used to just installing everything you need for development globally on your development machine, until it gets to a point where you can’t sanely reproduce what your production environment looks like, and you end up going with the nuclear option of destroying everything and starting over…

Enter Vagrant

Vagrant is an abstraction layer on Virtual Machine Engines that allows you to build a complete development environment in the virtual machine of your choosing. Vagrant is very much focused on automation and allows some very cool and exciting mechanisms to create repeatable builds of virtual machines with very minimal effort. In-fact, to get started, you real just need to do the following:

download and install a virtual machine engine such as VirtualBox or VMWare
download and install Vagrant
create a Vagrantfile, explained next

Vagrant File

Vagrant needs instructions on what to do to make you a virtual machine, so below is a snipit of a Vagrantfile:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.hostname = "sandbox"
  config.vm.box = "debian/jessie64"

  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
    sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
    sudo apt-get update
  SHELL

  config.vm.provision "docker" do |d|
      d.run "debian:jessie",
          name: "bash_container",
          cmd: "bash",
          daemonize: true
  end
#...

You can see in this Vagrantfile we are setting some particulars about the virtual machine that is being created, the name and what base operating system image we want to run on this virtual machine.

Next we actually start provisioning our virtual machine. This is the good stuff. Vagrant comes with a ton of provisioner such as chef, salt, ansible, shell, docker, and many more. This allows someone to very easily set up a repeatable environment.

The docker provisioning above actually installs docker on the virtual machine, starts the docker service and then performs the following:

	docker run -d -n bash_container debian:jessie /bin/bash

This command starts up a bash session in a container in daemon mode.

Pretty cool right?

There is more?

Vagrant also has the concept of volume mounting, allowing the vm to access a part of the host OS’s file system. What this allows me to do is mount my code bases inside of the virtual machine. This way I can have a virtual machine that contains all of my production environment installed packages and moreover, have a repeatable mechanism by which I can reproduce that environment.

What is even cooler is, you can take it a step further and volume mount the file system of the vagrant virtual machine host inside of docker containers you spin up…

I wonder what happens if you sshfs mount back to the physical host’s file system ;)

Anyhow, this is truly exciting for me to be able to provision a vm with all the development and build tools I need all the while allowing it to be repeatable and portable.