Nate Turner has posted a tutorial to his site sharing a step-by-step method for creating Symfony2 development environments with Vagrant. Vagrant (and Puppet) allow you to create a scriptable setup process that creates a VM with the same settings every time, making it easier to destroy and recreate as needed.

When we use Vagrant to create new virtual development environments we avoid the very real possibility that we could mess up our personal development machines. People have used virtual machines for development for years. [...] Managing installed applications across a teams VMs is a pain. Why not just include a Vagrantfile and a few Puppet manifests instead? Instead of passing around a virtual machine a few gigabytes in size, just include your Vagrant and Puppet in a project’s source control. That’s it. In future tutorials we will be using the environment we create here to start a new virtual machine running Symfony 2 with the above command.

He walks you through each of the steps, complete with commands and configuration changes to make everything cooperate:

• Create a Symfony Project with Composer
• Setting up Vagrant
• Provisioning with Puppet / Symfony’s Requirements
• Set up a new VirtualHost
• Set Apache to run as the Vagrant user

He's also posted the complete working script over on his GitHub account.

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.

Erika Heidi has posted the third part of her beginners guide to working with Puppet/Vagrant for development environments. In this latest post, she focuses on facts, conditionals and modules.

Finishing this guide to Vagrant and Puppet, I would like to show some advanced puppet resources. As I said before, Puppet is really powerful and extensive – I’m covering just the main concepts so you can have a good start point for creating your vagrant boxes.

She talks about the concepts behind facts first, pointing out that they're similar to variables, except that they're pre-defined. Conditionals let you do some basic logic and modules make it simpler to split up the functional pieces of the Puppet configuration into reusable chunks. She includes some code examples for these and how to set up your directory structure so you can create and use modules.

Ben Ramsey has a new post to his site today related to a talk of his that was accepted at this year's ZendCon conference about contributing to the PHP core:

I’ve been accepted to speak at ZendCon this year. One of the three talks I’ll be presenting is a new one: “Contributing to Core: My Journey to Add array_column() to the PHP Core.” While PHP conferences sometimes include talks or tutorials on creating PHP extensions or the intricacies of the PHP internals, I’ve never seen a talk about one’s personal experiences contributing to core, from start to finish, and how one would go about getting started. That’s what this talk is about.

He also shares a tool that he used when he was doing his own work on the array_column function - a PHP development Puppet setup that could be spun up and reproduced as needed. He also spends some time talking about the build cycle, how to run tests and a link to the Puppet Cookbook he kept close for reference.

Erika Heidi has posted the second part of her series looking at creating development environments with Vagrant and Puppet (part one is here). In this new post she talks about the configuration of the newly created environments.

In the first part of this beginner’s guide to Vagrant, we found out how to install Vagrant and get a really basic Ubuntu box up and running. But we need something more: we need to properly set up our development environment, in a fully automated way. Its time to use provisioners to help us with these tasks. For a better understanding of how provisioners work, lets start using a very basic shell script as a provisioner.

She talks about setting up the shell provisioning and how to use it from the Vagrantfile configuration. She includes the example output but notes that there's a better way than making lots of shell scripts for everything - using Puppet. Info about Puppet manifests (its configuration file format) and examples are included. An example is included of using puppet to provision a VM and a hint about things to come (puppet modules).

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.

Volker Dusch has a new tongue-in-cheek post to his site talking about a few pieces of useful software that are not written in PHP...and why not?

Dear PHP Community, we need to have a talk about the insufferable state of your software stacks. It was recently brought to my attention that there is software out there, software we use every day!, that is NOT written in PHP. This is completely unacceptable! We are PHPeople! We’re not “Web” Developers, we are the web. And we sure as hell are not some fancy “Software Developer”, you can ask anyone on the internet! Seriously: If it’s not PHP how will we ever be able to extend and adapt it to our needs! We are slaves of our tools!

He mentions several tools that, yes, while not written in PHP are very useful to just about any developer out there (including git, Puppet and Apache). But, more seriously:

PHP is a language that enables absolute beginners to start creating on the web using FTP and notepad! It let’s us realize and validate our ideas blazingly fast and allows us to adapt our successful ideas to beautifully scale with our requirements providing and relying on solid, battle-proof tools.