Local Development EnvironmentsVagrant, VirtualBox, and Ansible

Jeff Geerling

Prepackaged environments

• Traditional prepackaged development stacks:

• Apache, MySQL, PHP (WAMP/MAMP)

• Java/Tomcat

• Ruby/Rails

Prepackaged environments

• Difficulties:

• Real-world environments are more complex

• Single stack for multiple/different projects

• Prod server differences cause bugs

• Hard to configure

• “Snowflakes”

WAMP/MAMP/non-VM

“But it works on my machine!”

(we’re going to solve this problem)

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)

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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

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!

Simple, Repeatable VMs

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(or)- shell scripts

- puppet- chef- salt

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…)

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).

Getting Started

• Install VirtualBox

• Install Vagrant

• Install Ansible:$ sudo pip install ansible(like I said, difficult on Windows, even with Cygwin)

Build a CentOS VM

$ vagrant box add centos64 <url>$ vagrant init centos64$ vagrant up

•Done!

Provision the VM

•Add to the Vagrantfile that was just created:

config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible| ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml" ansible.sudo = trueend

•Then create playbook.yml:

---- hosts: all tasks: - yum: pkg=httpd state=installed

Provision the VM

• To run the provisioner:

vagrant provision

• Done!

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

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']

Provisioning on Windows

• See: Running Ansible within Windows

• See: JJG-Ansible-Windows

Resources

• Ansible documentation

• Vagrant documentation

• Ansible for Devops (book in progress)