I am designing an environment for productive research, i.e. writing, data-analysis, publication, etc.
In order to share the final results with others, I need to find a way to package this and to set up the local installation.
The project depends on Anaconda, so conda as a package manager is available.
It also includes
Pandoc and some pandoc packages, some will have to be fetched from Github directly because some versions are not available via conda-forge (doable in conda)
Atom and Atom packages; they should be installed and configured by my script (this works on the CLI via the apm package manager)
Node.js and Mermaid and a few other JS packages, which require npm calls
Some file-system-level operations, like deleting parts from packages where I only need a portion from, creating symlinks and aliases etc.
Maybe some Python code for modifying yaml/json/ini files or reading therefrom.
The main project will reside in a Github repository. It will be fine for users to clone it from there and start a build script locally.
My idea is to write a Bash shell script that
creates a conda environment based on requirements.yaml for everything that can be done this way
installs other parts using CLI commands (wget/curl etc.)
does all necessary modifications using CLI commands, maybe using a few short Python scripts (e.g. for changing or reading JSON or yaml files).
My local usage will be on OSX Big Sur, Linux should be supported, Windows compatibility would be nice-to-have.
Before I start:
Is this approach viable? I think it will be pretty transparent, but of course also a bit proprietary.
Docker is likely overkill for my purpose, and I also read that the execution will be slow on OSX.
The same environment will likely be installed multiple times on the same users' machine, so it is important that I can control e.g. the usage of existing packages and files via aliases or symlinks. It is not important that the multiple installations are decoupled for the non-python/non-conda parts (e.g. atom, node.js, mermaid could be the same binaries for all installations; just the set of Python packages might vary by installation).
Thanks for your expertise!
I am working on a college project along with a group of people. Our goal is to add features to an already existing application that runs on the web. Currently, I'm in the process of getting the source code to run on my machine. This consists of cloning a bunch of repos, installing MySQL and some (very old and outdated :-| ) versions of Python, and running some scripts. The process sounds straightforward but it isn't; there are a lot of dependancies that need to be met for the code to run, which means that I need to spend a lot of time looking at error logs trying to figure out what package is missing and needs to be installed or downgraded. But that's not the point of this question.
I'd like to make it easier for people to pick up the project in the future and work on it without having to spend hours just to get the code to compile. I'd like to get the project set up on a Linux VM (something I know how to do using VirtualBox) and then somehow share (?) that VM so that other people can simply set it up and be able to immediately have the code compiling (something that I don't know how to do, or if it is even possible).
Additionally, I'd like to be able to do all the coding on the host OS if possible, and only do the compiling/running on the VM (something I also don't know how to do). I would like some help/pointers with all the "I don't know" 's, as I don't know much about VM's other than how to set one up using VirtualBox.
You can use Vagrant to automate the provisioning of the VM, and setup all your tools and dependencies using Docker.
There are many good tutorials and sample vagrantfiles online to get you started. There is a learning curve involved, but well worth the effort. Many companies use Vagrant to quickly provision dev environments.
Vagrant can automatically download a specific distro/version of a VM from the web if one is not already locally installed. It can also provision a Docker container, in which you can install any required dependencies, tools, etc. You can store the vagrantfile, dockerfile, scripts, etc. in GitHub for easy access by your colleagues. All they would have to do is install Vagrant and run vagrant up from the command line.
If you want to write code on the host machine and compile/test it on the VM, you will need to setup a shared folder in the VM using Guest Additions (see here). Be VERY careful with line endings if you are working in Windows and running in Linux. You can setup the shared folder with Vagrant as well (see here).
I want to play around and check out Apache's couchdb as a possible back-end for a web-app that I am designing. Therefore I want to have an instance of couchdb, but also to be able to throw it away when the testing is done. The development computer is an Ubuntu laptop (not server). The problems are:
The Ubuntu repository has couchdb 1.0, but the couchdb website strongly recommends to install 1.1, built from source.
I have Erlang built and installed from source, because the Erlang distro from the repository is defective. I don't see the point in installing another Erlang aside it.
couchdb has a lot of dependencies, including a whole bunch of perl libs, that I really don't need, and prefer to throw away when I'm done.
So I am looking for a way to either:
Install couchdb 1.1 as a package that can be easily uninstalled, or
Build couchdb from source, with as few as possible installed dependencies, so when I'm done I can just delete it. Preferably, do this without building another Erlang distro, but configuring it to use the existing one.
Is any of these possible, and how? Thanks in advance.
Btw, I am aware of the build-couchdb project, but from what I read, it requires installing all the build dependencies in advance, which is undesirable, because it will leave a whole bunch of dangling packages in my system, without being a dependency of a couchdb package. It also fetches a copy of Erlang, which is redundant for me.
(Dear moderators: This questions combines issues that relate not only to programming, but also to server administration, Unix software, and, particularly, Ubuntu Linux issues. Therefore, it might be suitable for a few other stack exchange sites. I recon it is most likely to be answered here, since this kind of hackery is often done by programmers. However, if I am wrong, feel free to migrate it, and I apologies in advance for your troubles.)
You could install CouchDB into a chroot jail
A chroot is a way of isolating applications from the rest of your computer, by putting them in a jail. This is particularly useful if you are testing an application which could potentially alter important system files
From the Ubuntu instructions on creating a chroot jail
Another option, assuming your laptop has the appropriate hardware virtualization support, is to use KVM.
The KVM option might be more helpful in the long run as you could move the VM's disk image onto a server.
I have been reading page after page after page about the benefits of using YUM package installer and how NOBODY should built installs from source files (which again makes no sense to me) yet the repositories and source builders always package files in Tarball format, leaving a TON of work (which usually ends up going wrong) to the individual instead of formatting SRPMs for the end user.
Has the world gone mad? I feel like I am taking crazy pills!
Well, first of all there's more to life than just RPM and YUM. An SRPM would be (somewhat) useless to Debian, for instance.
As for why you'd use a package repository over building everything yourself, well I don't know about you, but I've much rather just run (I'm using Ubuntu so I have apt-get instead of yum):
# apt-get install firefox
Than trying to figure out all the dependencies, as well as all the dependencies dependencies, make sure I have the correct versions of everything, download/build/install any that I don't have (or are out of date: if updating existing dependencies, make sure the newer versions don't break any existing software that I have and make sure I don't end up with 15 different versions of the same thing), and only after all that then download/configure/build/install firefox.
Then realise I'll also want Open Office or MySQL and start all over again!
That said, there are some packages that I install the latest version of from source. For example, I run my media centre off MythTV and I always like to build the latest version of that from Subversion. But even then, with a package manager, that's as easy as:
# apt-get build-dep mythtv
> cd ~/src/mythtv/
> svn co <svn repo of mythtv>
> configure && (etc)
That is, the package management software already knows all the dependencies for MythTV and it can download and install them automatically. Why spend hours tracking it all down manually?
In the end, it sounds to me like maybe you'd prefer a distro like Gentoo... that's the benefit of Linux, of course. If you don't like how things are run in the Fedora/RedHat distribution, you can just choose a different one.
There are a few reasons to use a packaging infrastructure (like yum):
Creating "installations" is much easier to do, due to automatic dependency installation. From the simple yum install blah to creating chroots with mock/--installroot, or live CDs, etc.
Managing those installations. From the obvious yum update to operations which are much harder to do otherwise like: yum --security update, yum --bz=1234 update-minimal, yum --disablerepo=testing distro-sync.
Auditing those installations. The obvious examples here being yum history (not available in plain RHEL-5 atm.) and yum verify.
...however speed is not a factor, for instance Fedora rawhide moves as fast as gentoo.
RHEL-5 does not move that quickly, because it's 3 years old and is not supposed to break ... not because it's managed using yum/rpms. There are third party providers, like iuscommunity, which release co-installable newer releases for various packages. Or if you need to you create your own.
Or you can run a production server on Fedora rawhide or gentoo, both will have the latest packages really quickly ... I would not recommend that option though.
Among other things, tarballs are system independent and YUM appears to be RPM-based and thus mostly usable by Linux only (plus Netware and AIX, so as I said, Linux only :) )
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Every time a new developer joins the team or the computer a developer is using changes, the developer needs to do lots of work to setup the local development environment to make the current project work. As a SCRUM team we are trying to automate everything including deployment and tests so what I am asking is: is there a tool or a practice to make local development environment setup automated?
For example to setup my environment, first I had to install eclipse, then SVN, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP. After that I populated the DB and I had to do minor changes in the various configuration files etc... Is there a way to reduce this labor to one-click?
There are several options, and sometimes a combination of these is useful:
automated installation
disk imaging
virtualization
source code control
Details on the various options:
Automated Installation Tools for automating installation and configuration of a workstation's various services, tools and config files:
Puppet has a learning curve but is powerful. You define classes of machines (development box, web server, etc.) and it then does what is necessary to install, configure, and keep the box in the proper state. You asked for one-click, but Puppet by default is zero-click, as it checks your machine periodically to make sure it is still configured as desired. It will detect when a file or mode has been changed, and fix the problem. I currently use this to maintain a handful of RedHat Linux boxes, though it's capable of handling thousands. (Does not support Windows as of 2009-05-08).
Cfengine is another one. I've seen this used successfully at a shop with 70 engineers using RedHat Linux. Its limitations were part of the reason for Puppet.
SmartFrog is another tool for configuring hosts. It does support Windows.
Shell scripts. RightScale has examples of how to configure an Amazon EC2 image using shell scripts.
Install packages. On a Unix box it's possible to do this entirely with packages, and on Windows msi may be an option. For example, RubyWorks provides you with a full Ruby on Rails stack, all by installing one package that in turn installs other packages via dependencies.
Disk Images Then of course there are also disk imaging tools for storing an image of a configured host such that it can be restored to another host. As with virtualization, this is especially nice for test boxes, since it's easy to restore things to a clean slate. Keeping things continuously up-to-date is still an issue--is it worth making new images just to propagate a configuration file change?
Virtualization is another option, for example making copies of a Xen, VirtualPC, or VMWare image to create new hosts. This is especially useful with test boxes, as no matter what mess a test creates, you can easily restore to a clean, known state. As with disk imaging tools, keeping hosts up-to-date requires more manual steps and vigilance than if an automated install/config tool is used.
Source Code Control Once you've got the necessary tools installed/configured, then doing builds should be a matter of checking out what's needed from a source code repository and building it.
Currently I use a combination of the above to automate the process as follows:
Start with a barebones OS install on a VMWare guest
Run a shell script to install Puppet and retrieve its configs from source code control
Puppet to install tools/components/configs
Check out files from source code control to build and deploy our web application
I stumbled across this question and was very suprised that no one has mentioned Vagrant yet.
As Pete TerMaat and others have mentioned, virtualization is a great way to manage and automate development environments. Vagrant basically takes the pain away from setting up these virtual boxes.
Within minutes you can have a completely fresh copy of your favourite Linux distro up and running, and provisioned exactly the same way your production server is.
No more fighting with OSX or Windows to get PHP, MySQL, etc. installed. All software lives and runs inside the virtual machine. You can even SSH in with vagrant ssh. If you make a mistake or break something, just vagrant destroy it, and vagrant up to start over fresh.
Vagrant automatically creates a synced folder to your local file system, meaning you don't need to develop within the virtual machine (ie. using Vim). Use whatever your editor of choice is.
I now create a new "Vagrant box" for almost every project I do. All my settings are saved into the project repository, so it's easy to bring on another team member. They simply have to pull the repo, and run vagrant up, and they are literally ready to go.
This also makes it much easier to handle projects that have different software requirements. Maybe you have some projects that rely on PHP 5.3, but some newer ones that run PHP 5.4. Just install the version you want for that project.
Check it out!
One important point is to set up your projects in source control such that you can immediately build, deploy and run after checkout.
That means you should also checkin helper infrastructure, such as Makefiles, ant buildfiles etc., and settings for the tools, such as IDE project files.
That should take care of the setup hassle for individual projects.
For the basic machine setup, you could use a standard image. Another option is to use your platform's tools to automate installation. Under Linux, you could create a meta-package that depends on all the packages you need. Under Windows, a similar thing should be possible using MSI or the like.
Edit:
Ideally, instead of checking in helper infrastructure, you check in the information that allows the build to generate the helper infrastructure. This is the approach taken by e.g. the GNU build system (autotools etc.), or by Maven. This is even more elegant, because you can (theoretically) generate infrastructure for any (supported) build environment, thus you are not bound to e.g. one specific IDE, and settings in the helper infrastructure (paths etc.) don't need to duplicate the main project settings.
However, this also a more complex approach, so if you can't get it to work, I believe checking in stuff like IDE files directly is acceptable.
I like to use Virtual PC or VMware to virtualize the development environment. This provides a standard "dev environment" that could be shared among developers. You don't have to worry about software that the user could add to their system that may conflict with your development environment. It also provides me a way to work to two projects where the development environments can't both be on one system (using two different versions of a core technology).
Use puppet to configure both your development and production environment. Using a top-notch automation system is the only way to scale your ops.
There's always the option of using virtual machines (see e.g. VMWare Player). Create one environment and copy it over for each new employee with minimal configuration needed.
At a prior place we had everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) in SCM (clearcase then SVN). When a new developer can in they installed ClearCase|SVN and sucked down the repository. This also handles the case when you need to update a particular lib/tool as you can just have the dev teams update their environment.
We used two repo's for this so code and tools/config lived in separate places.
I highly recommend Blueprint from DevStructure. It's open-source and your use case is actually the exact reason we originally wrote the software. Our goals have somewhat changed, but it still is the perfect tool for what you are describing. In short, you can create reusable server configs - dead simple configuration management. I hope this helps!
https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint (Blueprint # Github)
I've been thinking about this myself. There are some other technologies that you could throw into the mix. Here's what I'm currently setting up:
PXE based pre-seeded installation images (Debian Squeeze). You can start up a bare-metal machine (or new virtual appliance) and select the image from the PXE boot menu. This has the major advantage of being able to install your environment on physical machines (in addition to virtual appliances).
Someone already mentioned Puppet. I use CFEngine but it's a similar deal. Essentially your configuration is documented and centralized in policy files which are continually enforced by an agent on the client.
if you don't want a rigid environment (i.e. developers may choose a combination of tool-sets) you can roll your own deb packages so new devs can type sudo apt-get install acmecorp-eclipse-env or sudo apt-get install acmecorp-intellij-env, for example.
Slightly off-topic, but if you run a Debian based environment (i.e. Ubuntu), consider installing apt-cacher (package proxy). In addition to saving bandwidth, it will make your installations much faster (since packages are cached on your local network).
If you're using OSX and working with Rails. I'd suggest either:
https://github.com/platform45/let-there-be-light
https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop
If you use machines in a standard configuration, you can image the disk with a fresh perfectly configured install -- that's a very popular approach in many corporations (and not just for developers, either). If you need separately configured OS's, you can tar-bz2 all the added and changed files once a configured OS is turned into your desired setup, and just untar it as root to make your desired environment from scratch.
if you're using a linux flavor, you've probably got a package management system: thinks .rpm for fedora/redhat, or .deb for ubuntu/debian. many of the things you describe already have packages available: svn, eclipse, etc. you could roll your own packages for company specific software, create a repository (perhaps only available on the local network) and then your setup could be reduced to a single bash script which would add the company repo to /etc/apt/sources.list (debian/ubuntu) and then call a command like,
/home/newhire$ apt-get update && apt-get install some complete package list
you could use buildbot to then automate regular builds for company packages that change often.
Try out DevScript at http://nsnihalsahu.github.io/devscript .
Its one command like ,
devscript lamp or devscript laravel or devscript django . In around a few minutes ,depending on the speed of your internet co