On DZone.com there's a new post from Giorgio Sironi looking at how to automate a build of a virtual server with Vagrant, setting up a LAMP-based development instance.
Vagrant ia a tool for building virtual machines (in VirtualBox's format) that conforms to a specification. It's written in Ruby, but it makes really no assumptions over the environments that you're gonna build; in this article, we will setup a virtual server for PHP applications running inside Apache.
The end result is a virtual machine based on VirtualBox images and can be built in a few easy steps:
- install the vagrant gems on the build system
- add a new virtual box instance pointed to a .box file
- create the Vagrant config (including the commands to run post-create)
- set up a little port forawrding
- creating a phpinfo file and starting up Apache
One suggested place for grabbing images (some with pre-defined software) is Bitnami's "Stacks" repository.