Installing a Virtual Development Instance of Ilios

A simple way of creating a development instance of the Ilios application is to use the tool Vagrant to create a quick virtual environment.

1. Go to Vagrantup.com and download and install Vagrant (v1.5.3) onto your local system where you will be installing the development instance of Ilios;

1a. For faster downloads install the vagrant cache pluging by opening a command line and typing vagrant plugin install vagrant-cachier

2. Go to VirtualBox and download and install VirtualBox onto your local system where you will be installing the development instance of Ilios;

3. Install Git for your machine. You can check if you already have git installed by opening a command line and typing git --version. It should output text similar to git version 1.8.4. If you are more comfortable not using the command line you may want to try Github for Mac or Github for Windows

4. Open a command line and clone the ilios repository with: git clone --recursive https://github.com/ilios/ilios.git

4a. If you have already cloned the Ilios repository you may need to run git submodule update --init.

5. Open a command line and navigate to the base Ilios directory (in which you will see the file called Vagrantfile);

6. If on a networked Windows machine, verify that the value for the variable HOMEDRIVE is set to the drive on which Ilios has been unpacked (eg, set HOMEDRIVE=C:). To do this using Control Panel, select System >> Change Settings >> Advanced (Tab) >> Environment Variables (button) >> New. Verify the value does not exist before adding it (Variable Name: 'HOMEDRIVE' Variable Value = 'C:')

7. From the Command Prompt, type the command, vagrant up

8. Approximately 90 to 130 seconds later, Ilios should be installed. You can access Ilios via browser by going to https://localhost:8443 and log in using the temporary default username zero_user and the password Ch4nge_m3.

Additional Information:

Most functionality relating to the Vagrant host is initiated using the vagrant command at the command line, followed by an argument. This works on Mac OS and Linux operating systems, but if you are using Cygwin on a Windows-based pc, you should make sure to the set the vagrant alias like this:

-- alias vagrant=vagrant.bat

so you can run something like, vagrant up.

To access the system via ssh, use the command vagrant ssh (on Mac or Linux); on Windows, ssh tunnel to the virtual server (localhost:2222) using a client such as PuTTY or Cygwin.

Once you have a tunnel connection started, log in with the username: vagrant (you may also require the password: vagrant. From there you may access the mysql database using root (no password).

-- vagrant@precise32:~$ mysql -u root

Once in mysql, make sure to select the ilios_db:

-- vagrant@lucid32:~$ use ilios_db

• To destroy the instance at any time, use the command vagrant destroy

• To re-instantiate the instance, use the command vagrant reload

• To completely rebuild the instance from scratch use the command vagrant up

• To restart the virtual machine and your existing dev instance after a shut down or restart, use the command vagrant up