Vagrant Debian

Vagrant recipe for mounting a virtual machine with the official Debian in its latest stable version, provided by VirtualBox and provisioned with the following stack, installed from main components or backports of the official package repositories:

• Nginx
• NodeJS
• PHP FPM + Xdebug + Composer
• MariaDB
• Mailhog

Hosts file

It you do not want to request and receive data by using a local domain, but only using an IP (default: 192.168.56.101), you can skip this section.

To forward requests from a local domain (default: local.test) to the virtual machine IP, your hosts file should be modified:

• Windows: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Mac and other Unix systems: /etc/hosts

Other domains such as my-app-domain.test or dev.my-app-domain.com can be appended to your hosts. A subdomain is recommended if you're planning to develop your app locally using https.

If you do not want to manually change your hosts for each new project, you can either:

• use different ports such as local.test:8001, local.test:8002, etc…
• use different folders such as local.test/my-first-app/, local.test/my-second-app/, etc…
• install vagrant-hostmanager and setup Vagrantfile accordingly

Shared folder(s)

Some issues might occur when running npm install or composer install in a shared folder. The easiest workaround is to create a symlink (in the guest file system) from a non shared folder to the current shared folder:

With Composer, run ln -s -T ~/composer/<my-app> vendor from /var/www/<my-app>/.

With npm, run the following commands from /var/www/<my-app>/:

    ln -s ~/npm/<my-app>/node_modules
    cd ~/npm/<my-app>
    ln -s /path/to/<my-app>/package.json
    ln -s /path/to/<my-app>/package-lock.json

Note: if you have protocol errors when using ln -s, you should open your terminal (and run vagrant up) with admin privileges.

Watching files

Some interfaces for watching files (eg. fs.watch in NodeJS) may require installing vagrant-notify-forwarder, because Virtual Box does not forward change events on host files to the guest. Polling (and diffing previous/current last modification time) is an alternative offered by some tools (eg. Webpack), that is fast enough when the number of watched files remains moderate.

Todo

• Add settings in config.yaml to configure Nginx (with Augeas)
• Remove puppetlabs/mysql dependency