vagrant-pimatic-dev

vagrant-pimatic-dev creates and configures a portable, reproducible and lightweight virtual development environment for pimatic. It enables cross-platform development of pimatic and pimatic plugins.

Installation

First, make sure you have the latest version of Vagrant and VirtualBox installed.

Then, do:

$ git clone https://github.com/baswenneker/vagrant-pimatic-dev.git
$ cd vagrant-pimatic-dev
$ vagrant up

This will download a virtual machine image and start a bootstrap process that installs node.js and pimatic-dev. Running vagrant up for the first time will take a while so go grab a coffee.

Post installation

You should add these options to the settings section of your config.json to get debug outputs:

"debug": true,
"logLevel": "debug"

Additionally, change the password or replace the username and password by "enabled": false to develop without being asked for credentials:

"authentication": {
    "enabled": false
}

Usage

Note that Vagrant syncs the vagrant-pimatic-dev (on the host machine) with /vagrant (on the guest machine) so you can use your IDE from the host machine for development.

To launch pimatic, execute the folowing (from the vagrant-pimatic-dev):

$ cd <vagrant-pimatic-dev-folder>

# If not done already, do a vagrant up
$ vagrant up 

# The following command sshs into the vagrant virtual machine.
$ vagrant ssh

# Go to the pimatic-dev folder and start the pimatic daemon:
$ cd /vagrant/pimatic-dev
$ sudo node_modules/pimatic/pimatic.js start

Then point your browser on the host machine to http://localhost:4567 for the web-interface. Please keep in mind that the Vagrantfile contains a rule that maps port 80 from the guest machine to port 4567 on the host machine.

Tips

Most of the times I find myself opening a second terminal window to keep track of the pimatic-daemon.log file:

$ tail -f /vagrant/vagrant-pimatic-dev/pimatic-daemon.log

tail -f keeps refreshing and restarting pimatic has no effect on the tail.

Develop your plugin against Pimatic GitHub repo

The bootstrap.sh installs pimatic from the NPM repository. This means some files that are available in the pimatic GitHub repository are not available (for example the Gruntfile is missing in the pimatic NPM module). Here's how to clone pimatic from GitHub:

$ cd /vagrant/vagrant-pimatic-dev/node_modules
$ rm -rf pimatic/
$ git clone https://github.com/pimatic/pimatic.git

# Don't forget to install the dependencies
$ cd /node_modules/pimatic
$ npm install

For more information on pimatic development, read the pimatic development guide.