Vagrant and Drupal, a winning team

While heading back home from DrupalCon Munich after 4 days of good interaction with lots of Drupal folks.
I realized to my big suprise that there are a lot of people using Vagrant to make sure that developers are not working on platforms they invented their own. Lots of people have realized that "It works on my computer" is not something they want to hear from a developer and are reaching out to give them viable solutions to work on shared and reproducible solutions.

There were 2 talks proposing solutions to the problem,

the first one was ..Fearless development with Drush, Vagrant and Aegir by Christopher Gervais He talked about Drush VAgrant Integraion and how extentions to Drush allow for easy vagrant integration , bridging this gap allows rupal developers to use a tool they are already familiar with

The second one was Jochen Lillich who explained how he us using Vagrant an Chef for this purpose his talk titled Use datacenter tools to make your dev life easier has been posted already.

During the Vagrant BOF , I briefly ran over @patrickdebois old slides on Vagrant after which people started discussing their use cases.. 2 other projects came up

First is Project Oscar which aims at providing developers with a default Drupal development environment in a Jiffy. they do this by providing a bunch of puppetmanifests that sets up a working environment.

And the second one is Ariadne which is a standardized virtual machine development evironment for easily developing Drupal sites in a local sandbox that is essentially identical to a fully-configured hosted solution. It attempts to emulate a dedicated Acquia/Pantheon server as closely as possible, with added development tools. Project Ariadne is just like the examples from Jochen Lillich based on Chef

With all of these tools and examples around , there should be no excuses anymore for Drupal developers to hack on their own machine and tell the systems people "It works on my machine" (let alone to hack in production).

Comments

Vincent's picture

#1 Vincent : an excellent combo

thanks for sharing about your learnings in DrupalCon. Was supposed to be there but there was a sudden change in my schedule. The extensions to Drush are really a big help!


patcon's picture

#2 patcon : @Mark: I've been meaning to

@Mark: I've been meaning to check out ansible ever since I came across the vagrant plugin that allows it to act as a provisioner.

And hey, thanks for the mention on Ariadne Kris! We're also working on a Jenkins environment called Inception, but the intention is that it's simply using Vagrant for evaluation purposes before allowing a user to spin up an actual cloud instance.
https://github.com/myplanetdigital/inception


Christopher Gervais's picture

#3 Christopher Gervais : Drush Vagrant Integration

Thanks for the mention, Kris. I'd love to get more feedback from you on the direction we're taking with drush-vagrant.

Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the session recording, so there isn't a video posted. If there's interest, I'll see about putting up a demo/tutorial video.


JJ's picture

#4 JJ : Chris, please put up a demo/tut

Chris,

Please could you put up a demo of tut. I'm looking at ways to streamline how to do this.

Thx,

JJ


Mark's picture

#5 Mark : Ansible a good choice

I would also suggest Ansible to use with Vagrant, it's a really simple configuration management + deployment system that we hope will supplant Puppet & Chef.