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Vagrant is Awesome

I've been working on PHP web apps for years, and over time, my development workflow has remained fairly constant:

  1. Configure new app in apache/nginx
  2. Starting coding to find out my environment is broken
  3. Fix my environment
  4. Continue coding
  5. Get bored
  6. See step 1

Managing DevOps items when I should be focusing on building a product is not beneficial to my productivity.

Enter Vagrant.

Ever wanted to have a dev environment built for you automatically? Yeah, who doesn't? Vagrant can do that for you. With the help of Oracle's VirtualBox, Vagrant creates a virtual machine, can provision it with the packages and services you define in a text file, and creates helpful links in between your host OS and the guest OS.

Phalcon PHP

I need to write another post entitled "Phalcon is Awesome". I've only recently started to develop with the C-extension based PHP framework, but boy does it pack a punch. One phrase before I do a write-up: ~800 requests per second.

The only downside of using Phalcon is having to compile and load it for use by PHP. git clone-ing the cphalcon repo and running the build script is easy enough, but what if you're getting help from a creative that has no idea how to set up a virtual host on their local machine, let alone compiling a PHP extension?

Use Vagrant, of course!

I've been using Vagrant to host a Phalcon project for a while, and I managed to extract out the Vagrant goodies into a stand-alone project: vagrant-phalcon. With the help of a Puppet manifest and a bash script, vagrant-phalcon helps developers of all skill levels start with Phalcon with an easy vagrant up command. Details from the README.md:

Getting Started

  1. Download and install VirtualBox
  2. Download and install Vagrant
  3. Clone this repo
  4. Run vagrant up in the repo directory
  5. Visit http://localhost:8081/ in your favorite browser
Note

Nginx is configured by default to use ./src/Public/ as the root directory. If your public directory differs, be sure to update the Vagrantfile to reflect your needs.

While not perfect, it does the job of setting up a Phalcon dev environment quite well, so I felt content with releasing it out into the wild. Happen to find a problem with it or have a suggestion? Submit an issue, or better yet, submit a pull-request.

Here's an ascii-cast walkthrough: