Falmouth Dev Environment

This is a working example of using Rake, Vagrant, and the Scholars' Lab's Chef cookbook to create a working development environment for a site based on Omeka and Solr.

Requirements

This requires this software to get started:

• Ruby
• Rake
• Vagrant
• git

What This Does

This provides a set of Rake tasks to manage the Vagrant-managed VM.

What's Missing

In order for this to work, you'll need to set the passwords specified in the Vagrantfile. For most of you, this will be impossible, since you don't have any access to the resources mentioned. However, this should still provide a good example of setting up a system like this.

You'll also need the content for the site, provided by a database dump and a tarball of static files. In the Rakefile, these are named falmouth-production.sql.gz and archive.tar.bz2. It will run successfully without these, but the database won't be populated, and the you'll need to remove the init task's dependencies on setup:loaddb and setup:archive.

Usage

Basically, you'll use this by putting the Vagrantfile and Rakefile into a directory and calling:

$ rake init

Once it's done, you need to finish upgrading Omeka and trigger recreating the Solr index. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Go to http://localhost:8050/admin/upgrade to upgrade the database.
2. Log in and go to http://localhost:8050/admin/plugins to upgrade the plugins.
3. Deactivate the COinS plugin.
4. Configure the SolrSearch plugin at http://localhost:8050/admin/plugins/config?name=SolrSearch. Change the Solr core name to /solr/.
5. Go to the Solr Index panel at http://localhost:8050/admin/solr-search/reindex/ and force a re-index.

That's it. You can access the web site at http://localhost:8050/.

What Does It Do?

First, the init task clones the Chef cookbooks it needs from GitHub.

Then it initializes the VM. This sets up Omeka and Solr. This also downloads the Falmouth Omeka theme and the CsvImport, SolrSearch, VraCoreElementSet, and Dropbox plugins. Finally, it loads the data (the database dump and the static file archive) and configures Solr.

Rake Tasks

The Rakefile has a number of useful tasks.

rake init

This pulls down all the data it can and sets up the site. This should only need to be called once.

rake clobber

This removes everything that the init task set up. This destroys the VM and removes the two GitHub repositories it downloaded.

rake chefst

Sometimes, Chef has problems setting things up, and it leaves a stacktrace file on the VM. This makes a SSH call to cat the file to the terminal.

rake halt

This does a graceful shutdown of the VM. This is better than calling vagrant halt, which does a hard shut-down.