Simple Vagrant LAMP box

Features

• Simple administration. This script doesn't require the learning curve of Puppet or Chef, though I recommend you looking into either of those solutions. Instead, it uses a simple shell script to install packages and import the database.
• VM Description
  • 1GB RAM
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit
  • Apache w/ mod_rewrite
  • MySQL
  • PHP
  • Pear
  • XDebug
  • MailCatcher
  • MySQL database named devdb and a username of devdb having access to it with the password devdb

Setup

Edit Vagrantfile to share the 3 folders form your host machine into your VM. I recommend symlinking folders from your current project to these in your home folder. Then you can just change the symlinks to move between projects. If you don't really need a dev database you can probably remove the sqldump and scripts shared folders.

These 3 folders are:

• www
  • This is the web root of the website you want hosted in the VM
• sqldump
  • This is where the database SQL file is stored. Initially it's fine for this to be empty, but if you destory the VM, a sqldump file located here will be imported into the VM's database when it is created. The file should be named database.sql
• scripts
  • This is where you can place various scripts that you might want access to. A good example would be a script that can dump out the database and place it in the folder where the VM will look to import it from when it is being created. See below section for an example command to dump the database. You can run that script any time you want to update the backup of your database that will be restored when the VM is created.

When you first boot the VM or recreate it, you might see some warning messages from apache about not being able to determine the ServerName. The bootstrap file eventually fixes this as it goes through its process. There is also an rdoc notice that can be ignored.

Edit your local hosts file to point a domain to 192.168.56.101 then use that domain in your browser to hit the site your VM is serving.

What is the bootstrap.sh script doing?

• Sets the MySQL root password to root
• Updates software on the VM
• Installs necessary packages
• Deletes the test database in MySQL
• Creates the devdb MySQL database and user
• Imports database.sql into the devdb database if the file exists
• Sets ServerName for Apache to keep it from complaining
• Enables mod_rewrite
• Allows use of .htaccess files
• Install MailCatcher
• Starts MailCatcher
• Installs XDebug
• Sets PHP configuration values:
  • Send mail via MailCatcher
  • Turns on display_errors
  • Turns on error_reporting and sets to development values (display everything)
  • Turns on html_errors
  • Tells PHP about XDebug
• Restarts Apache

Creating the database dump file

In case you need some assistance, this command, run from inside the VM, will dump the devdb database into a file called database.sql and place it into /var/sqldump/ which should be shared to your host computer, thus it will continue to exist even if the VM is destroyed.

mysqldump -uroot -proot devdb > /var/sqldump/database.sql

What is MailCatcher?

Check out the MailCatcher homepage, but the short description is that it catches email being sent and let's you view it via a web interface (port 1080 on the VM). This way you don't have to actually send email through the internet and wait for it to be delivered, etc. You can check the queue with your browser easily and clear it whenever you'd like. This also means that you could make your VM send thousands of emails (intentionally or unintentionally) and easily see if they would have been delivered.