Dev environment

Practical HowTo for creating a Vagrant/VirtualBox based development environment.

Important

This environment is dedicated to the program and should not be used 'as is' for writing production code (mainly because off SSH settings for GitHub). Keep in mind that this environment is not permanent and will eventually be destroyed.

HowTo

Install some software on your PC

First you have to download and install the following software on your machine

• VirtualBox (version > 5.2.18)
• Vagrant (version > 2.1.5)

Test the install:

• Open a console and run vagrant -v. You should see something like: Vagrant 2.1.5
• Open VirtualBox

Use Vagrant to download and provision a Virtual Machine

After the install of VirtualBox and Vagrant is complete, you can use Vagrant to install a fully provisioned VM

• Download this repository as a zip file. click on the green Clone or Downoload button and choose Download ZIP as explained here
• On your machine, unzip the downloaded file dev-environment-master.zip in a convenient folder of your choice (C:\Users\myself\wit\ for example, the name and the location of the folder does not matter)
• IMPORTANT: You need to open the Vagrantfile with a text editor and provide your GitHub username, the email address you have registered on GitHub, the number of cpus and and amount of RAM you can give to the virtual machine. Then save the file Vagrantfile.
• Open a console and navigate to the same folder, where the Vagrantfile is.
• then run vagrant up ... this will take a few minutes.

Fine tuning (VM's settings in VirtualBox)

You can adjust some of the VM's setting in VirtualBox without updating the Vagrantfile

The Vagrantfile defines a VM with 2 cores and 2048 Mb of RAM by default. But once your VM is created you can change these settings as long as the VM is stopped (shut down). Be carefull to set values that won't compromise the host machine. The following settings can be modified like this: open VirtualBox, select your VM, then press Settings > System > and:

• Motherboard if you want to allocate more RAM (drag the cursor and stop before the red zone)
• Processor if you want to use more available cores. Use the cursor to give more cores to the VM

Use VirtualBox to access your VM

In VirtualBox, just after provisioning you can press the see button (opens as new window). You can stop and start the VM at any time from VirtualBox.

Make the VM ready to use with a few manual steps

You need to go through these few manual steps to complete the install

• Check keyboard mapping. You might need to run the following command in the Guest VM to ajust keyboard mapping: sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
• Open web-browser from the task bar and make Chrome your default browser
• Add your public SSH key to GitHub: xclip is already installed on your VM. Just run: xclip -sel clip < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (this will copy the key in your clipboard) And follow these instructions from step 2
• You can test your SSH connection to GitHub like this, from step 1 (no need to follow other links)

Daily use

Troubleshouting

• ASystem program problem detected window pops up in the host, just after starting the VM.

  It happens that the display manager crashes (while resizing the window or switch to full screen). Ubuntu informs the user by prompting a modal window indicating System program problem detected. Solution: Haven't found yet how to avoid LigthDM to crash, but you can get rid of the info message. Run following command: sudo rm -rf /var/crash/*

• Some keys don't map to the keyboard.

  Add manually those keys with xmodmap command. The Mac keyboard doesn't map the single-quote (aka apostrophe) on Linux (even after configuration with sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration) You have first to identify some available mappings with xmodmap -pke (+ eventuel | grep 57 where n is the key number 57). The 5th position in the output is the mapped result of AltGr+key.

  So we add the following to our .zshrc to make the combination AltGr+n to produce ':

  xmodmap -e "keycode 57 = n N s N apostrophe N n"

Under the hood

Our lubuntu 18.04 box is hosted on Vagrant Cloud

Installed software on the VM:

• Java 8
• Maven
• Git
• node
• npm
• Gedit
• cUrl
• Visual Studio Code
• Jetbrains toolbox (easy install IntelliJ - later)