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

Configuring hosts

It you do not want to request and receive data via a local domain (default: local.test) rather than the virtual machine IP (default: 192.168.56.101), you can skip this section.

Your hosts file should include a mapping from the IP to the hostname of the virtual machine. This file is located:

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

You may want to append other domains such as my-app-domain.test or dev.my-app-domain.com. A subdomain is recommended to develop an app with 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 to a non shared folder:

    cd /var/www/<my-app>

    # For Composer
    mkdir -p ~/composer/<my-app>
    ln -s -T ~/composer/<my-app> vendor

    # For npm
    mkdir -p ~/npm/<my-app>
    ln -s ~/npm/<my-app>/node_modules
    cd ~/npm/<my-app>
    ln -s /var/www/<my-app>/package{-lock}.json

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

Watching files

You may need vagrant-notify-forwarder to watch files (eg. with fs.watch in NodeJS) 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 that remains fast enough when the number of watched files remains moderate.

Debugging a NodeJS script

To inspect a NodeJS script in Chrome Dev Tools, add local.test:9222 as a network target in chrome://inspect/#devices. Port 9222 is automatically mapped between the host and virtual machines when connecting to the latter with vagrant ssh.

Todo

• Add settings in config.yaml to configure Nginx
• Remove puppetlabs/mysql dependency