Geshan Manandhar has posted a "getting started" guide to getting a LEMP environment up and running (LEMP being Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP) through a Vagrant setup.

A software engineer tells to a colleague in his team "Man, it is working on your machine, but why is it not working on mine?", then they both find out that one has Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with PHP 5.3 and the other software engineer on which the code is working is Ubuntu 14.04 with PHP 5.5 after some investigation. If you have ever faced this or similar problem its high time to switch to a portable and a reproducible virtual development environment shared among all team members. This is a context where Vagrant comes into play.

He introduces Vagrant and some of the problems it can help with for development groups. He includes some of the basic terminology and mentions some of the alternatives, including Docker and some of the Google popularity results comparing the two. Finally, he gets down to creating the Vagrant configuration with the PuPHPet service with screenshots of each step of the way. He wraps up the post with a look at how you can determine if things are working and how to add records to your hosts file to make the machine easier to reference.

Juan Treminio passed along a note about his GUI-based virtual machine builder PuPHPet and some recent advancements in what it supports.

PuPHPet just added support for HHVM via FastCGI for Apache/Nginx and needs your help to create a VM and report any bugs encountered to make the experience as smooth as possible.

PuPHPet makes creating Vagrant/Puppet configurations much simpler and does a lot of the hard work for you. The project is also open sourced on GitHub so you can always add support for anything you might not see.

On the SitePoint PHP blog Matthew Setter is back with the second part of his series looking at using PuPHPet to make VMs easily. In this second part, he continues on and looks more at the configuration files generated and tweaking them a bit.

We looked at how to configure most of the options and how to use the generated configuration, with some basic vagrant commands. But that's as far as we went. So in this second part of the series, we're going further. Specifically, we're going to be looking at the two core files used: common.yaml, and Vagrantfile. We'll be making some changes to them, then provisioning the virtual machines to reflect the configuration changes.

He talks about some of the changes he'll be making including the location of the shared folder and some of the setup of the PHP installation. He also updates the XDebug and MySQL configurations to change a few other options for more control over the resulting instance.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Matthew Setter introduces you to a tool that can help make the setup and configuration of your Vagrant/Puppet development environments a lot easier - PuPHPet.

I can't speak for you, but one of my pet peeves about software development is environments. Whether it's creating and maintaining them for different projects with different needs; ensuring environment parity across a development team, (especially when they're remote); or between environments such as development, testing, and production. Across all of these, it can be a laborious task, especially when done manually. [...] In pursuit of ending this pain and making the entire process as efficient as possible, I set about the task of learning Vagrant & Puppet. [...] However, like most people in the modern world, I'm impatient. Like you, I have a lot going on, plus I was not seeking to become a guru. I felt there must be a way to come up to speed quickly but without becoming an aficionado.

This "better way" cam in the form of PuPHPet, a GUI tool (web-based) that lets you specify the options you want included in the configuration and generates the needed configuration files for you. This tool (created by Juan Treminio) makes it a lot simpler to get up and running quickly. Matthew walks you through a sample configuration and, with screenshots, and show you how to specify options for things like the web server, server software to install and PHP extensions to include.

Over on YouTube David Adams has posted a video showing you how to use PuPHPet with Digital Ocean. PuPHPet is a easy to use, graphical tool to help make building Vagrantfiles quick and easy. Digital Ocean bills itself as a cloud service "built for developers" that lets you spin up cloud servers quickly.

The video's about 30 minutes long, but it walks you through the entire process. It's a screencast you can easily follow along with. Unfortunately some of the text is a bit small (and hard to read full-screen) but he talks you through the commands too, which helps.

You can find out more about Digital Ocean's "droplets" here.

On Reddit.com there's a new post from trymuchharder showing how to get a full environment - complete with Git, Composer, PHPUnit and an install of Laravel - up and running with Vagrant+PuPHPet. It's shared as a series of screencasts so you can follow along the whole process.

This took some time to get set up and i figure others can benefit from what i learned. [...] I've never done a screencast/tutorial and apparently the QuickTime/iMovie combo produces a super crappy video but hopefully you can distinguish which pixels are what. Please excuse my Texan accent and general ineptness when it comes to server stuff. [...] This all assumes you have the following installed to your local machine: Vagrant, VirtualBox, Composer, PHPUnit and Git.

It's a four part video series he's posted to YouTube (over on his account) and it shows the flow through the entire process including a small bit about using Laravel there at the end.

Juan Treminio has written up an introductory post to Puppet and Vagrant and their use to make virtual machines for your PHP environments.

Why should I use a virtual machine? Being a PHP developer has a much lower barrier to entry than Python, Ruby. Only Javascript is easier to start with. Tools such as XAMPP, MAMP, Homebrew, etc, make installing a basic LAMP stack on your computer extremely easy. So why would you want to give this up and use a slow, bulky and cryptic virtual machine?

He notes that the Puppet+Vagrant combination solves some of the common problems developers have setting up environments. He goes through what the two tools are and shows (screenshots) what the results look like. He includes a sample Puppet manifest, its configuration file, that loads an environment with PHP 5, Apache, a virtual host, PEAR, Composer and some other various configuration settings. He also mentions his PuPHPet tool he's created to make generating these kinds of configuration files simpler.

Juan Treminio has written up a post about a new tool he's created that makes generating Vagrant/Puppet configs easy - PuPHPet.

I just released the initial version of PuPHPet, my GUI-based gnerator for Vagrant/Puppet environments! [...] Enter PuPHPet, my GUI configurator. I have created a simple, easy to use web app that targets PHP developers and the classic LAMP stack. You will not need to learn the ins and outs of Vagrant or Puppet to build your own working VM to your specific needs. As of now you can define things like custom virtual hosts, what version of PHP to install, set up some MySQL databases, etc, all without having to touch a manifest file.

His tool (hosted version is here) lets you define things like machine name, IP address, memory and target folder. You can pick from various server, PHP, MySQL and Apache packages you want installed as well. A custom archive (zip) file will be created that can be dropped into your system ready for use.