If you don't want to use Puppet or Chef, you can
just configure an instance by hand (by SSHing into it, usually) and regenerate a Vagrant
box from the result.
Actually, even if you do want to use Puppet, a VM can be useful. I have a local VM (not
Vagrant) set up that I use to test new puppet manifests. I'm using our
operations/puppet production branch directly. As is, it wasn't completely
straightforward to set this up with the way our puppet repository is now, but it is
possible. Labs is good for final testing of manifests, but it is hard to use it to test
changes as you make them.
So ummmm, yeahhhhhh! This could be good for (some) ops people too.
On Oct 16, 2012, at 6:24 AM, Ori Livneh <ori(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Monday, October 15, 2012 at 10:28 PM, Andrew Bogott wrote:
Does a single-instance install provide a
sufficient test platform for
80% of the likely patches, or does all of the interesting stuff require
a full-blown cluster?
I don't want to guess percentages, but a significant amount of development work --
especially front-end -- can be adequately tested on a VM.
If single-system servers are truly useful in most
cases, then a
prepackaged VM image seems straightforward and handy. Presuming that
the devs are willing/able to run a few git commands before they start
coding, we could potentially leave puppet and Vagrant out of the
equation and just build a one-off image by hand and include strict
instructions to fetch and rebase immediately after opening. It looks
like that's roughly what Mozilla is doing at the moment.
Vagrant is a means for doing precisely that. If you don't want to use Puppet or Chef,
you can just configure an instance by hand (by SSHing into it, usually) and regenerate a
Vagrant box from the result. Vagrant can set up shared folders between the host and guest
VM, so what we might want to do is simply tell Vagrant to mount its project directory on
the host machine as /srv/mediawiki (or whatever) in the guest VM, and have apache serve
that. That makes it very easy to track head in git: you keep a clone of the repository
up-to-date on your local disk, and leave it for the VM to serve it. That would spare
people the trouble of having to set up a LAMP stack.
Is anyone interested in taking this on? I've done it before and found it useful, so
I'd be happy to provide some assistance. Otherwise I'll work on it myself when I
get the chance.
--
Ori Livneh
ori(a)wikimedia.org
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