I need to create a local development environment and struggling a little with the setup. I want to replicate my live server as close as I possibly can.
I want to install Magento ver 2.1.8, running MySQL 5.6, PHP 7.0 with NginX and Debian.
Now, it would be more than one person which will be working on the development sites, therefore, it will have to stored on our local server.
We are working on Windows 10 Pro machines.
I had a look at tools such as VirtualBox, Vagrant and Docker but reading about them got me even more confused.
I had a brief look at the LAMP stack too. Could you recommend the best way to go for my situation?
Do I have to use these tools in combination with each other?
Do I have to install the software on each computer or on local server?
I recommend to use this docker container: https://github.com/yvoronoy/magento2docker
It uses apache but you can change it via editing Dockerfile. Main advantage in this container is configured sshfs mounting in MacOS which works a little bit faster that default mounting, and you can work with source code as you work on local instance.
Is there an established way to take a Vagrant box and use it as the operating system for a "bare metal" machine, i.e. a normal computer and not a hypervisor, without having to sit through an installation process?
Now I understand the common response will probably be "install an OS regularly and then use a proper configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef" but hear me out. Our IT organization would like to create a base Vagrant box with all security-related protocols and applications enforced. Then a configuration management tool like Puppet could install "useful" applications like databases and web servers on top of it.
This works best when a software developer wants to deploy a new utility to development environments or servers - they can write the Puppet code to install exactly what they want, which can be turned over to IT to run it on top of the validated Vagrant box to create a virtual machine server.
By hosting the Vagrant box internally, we can hide the security details from the developer while they write new Puppet code, they can test their Puppet code on the same environment they will run it on, and it will provision much faster during testing since the box is just downloaded once. Most "production" deployments will stay as Virtual Machines.
In rare circumstances, we may want a real, bare-metal server, not a VM, probably when we get new hardware to run more VMs or if the utility we need is very computationally intensive. It would be nice if the existing Vagrant box could be repurposed so bare-metal and virtual servers were indistinguishable.
EDIT: I found a post on askubuntu (https://askubuntu.com/questions/32499/migrate-from-a-virtual-machine-vm-to-a-physical-system) which seems to do what I want, can anyone verify if such a procedure would work on a Vagrant disk image, if there would be necessary cleanup (like Vagrant ssh keys) or if it could be generalized to non-Ubuntu operating systems (since it uses Live CD)?
A Vagrant box packaged for VirtualBox is essentially a virtual disk with metadata. Most likely it's going to have the VirtualBox tools and drivers installed, which won't do much good on a physical system. Not only that, the drivers for the physical system would need to be installed on the box image.
What you're talking about doing is a good use case for some sort of "ghosting" software that simply copies blocks of data to a physical disk. There's really no advantage to using Vagrant here that I can see.
I've read this article:
How is Docker different from a normal virtual machine?
I have huge intend of converting all my virtual images into docker instances.
I can't see an angle where vm still make sense...
So what's the point to VM now? Ok... maybe the desktop virtualization to have pulseaudio working?
Once docker solve this, what else?
UPDATE
Okay... So I can't run docker in "non-linux" favour hosts...
For one point you can't run an operating system within your container that is different from the OS on the host.
On Windows and Mac OSX boot2docker is used to run Docker which is VirtualBox running a reduced Linux OS which runs Docker.
The benefits of containers are clear and well known, but the disadvantages have been glossed over somewhat.
Specifically, you don't just need the same OS type (aka linux), you get the same version of the kernel (including any mods you want.) Since containers are an OS construct, there are resource islands per OS kernel version (and different implementations for Windows, BSD or any non-linux if they exist).
VM's are secured with CPU level isolation, containers are secured with OS level isolation (with arguably a bigger attack surface).
There are many claims out there that containers are as slow and as big as VM's once you load up your container with everything you need for production and add lots of overlays, but these are all anecdotal and no large scale survey or trustable data is available yet.
On my OSX machine I have two VM's running:
Development Environment (aka DE) (Linux)
Testing Environment (aka TE) (Win7 IE9)
In my TE, I would like to be able to access a server running on my DE. Pretty straight forward sounding but I'm sort of new.
I'm using Virtualbox as my client on both machines. My dev environment is a vagrant box setup with puppet. I can modify it with virtualbox as well for now. SIMPLEST solution wins. I have tried nested-boxing, it doesn't work :P
I was able to achieve the desired results much more easily than I had anticipated. I had to add the same lines I added to my local machine to my VM.
Heres the problem. I use around three different machines for development. My partner is using two. We have to go through the same freaking set up procedure on all five machines to get to work.
Working with a php project here, so:
Install and configure, PDT, a php debugger, and some version of XAMPP.
Then possible install an svn client, and any other tools.
Again, to each of the five machines.
What if, instead, we did all of this once, in a virtual machine that is set up with the same stack, same versions, as the production server. Then each of us could grab a copy of the VM image, run that image on each of the five machines and do all of our development in that VM. Put Eclipse, apache, mysql, the works, all in that vm.
The only negative of this approach, and please correct me on the only part, is performance. Is it really that big of an issue though? The slowest machine out of the five is a Samsung NC10 powered by an Intel Atom 1.6 ghz processor.
Do you think this is possible and practically usable? Or am I crazy?
I use a VM for development (running on my laptop) and have never had performance problems. Another approach that you could take would be to image the drive in the state that you want. Use Acronis or Ghost to re-image each machine when you need to. Only takes about 5-10 minutes to restore an image on any modern PC.
I use a VM for all my "work" as it keeps it away from my "play". This set up allows me to use the office VPN without exposing my whole machine to the office environment (which I trust about as much as the internets. ;-) Also I don't have to worry about messing up my development environment by trying games or other software. My work VM is currently running inside VirtualBox but I have used VMWare in the past. I have only noticed performance issues when using graphic intensive programs like Webex or the Terminal Server Client.
It can certainly be done. What turns me off is the size of the VM image, which would normally be several GBs. Having it on a network share means it can take longer to transfer then your current setup process takes. I guess an external hard drive would be the easiest way to move it around.
Performance wouldn't be an issue with any web development.
I have to ask why your current machines need to be "re-imaged" each time you sit down for work?
If you're using Windows you'll probably want to use SYSPREP on the master image so that the 'mini-setup' runs when you boot up the virtual machines for the first time.
Otherwise in terms of Windows' point of view, the machines have the exact same SID, hostname and other things - running multiple machines with the same SID on the same network can cause tons of headaches. Even more if you want them to communicate with each other.
I've run websphere for zSeries on a vmware virtual machine with no problem and websphere is more resource intensive then any PHP stack. I find that having a multi core machine or at least hyper threading makes it run a lot faster.
With vmware, disk operations are slower. For PHP development I doubt it would be a problem, but you'd definitely notice it if you are compiling a large C++ project. There is also Sun's VirtualBox which is free, and the latest version is rather nice (but I haven't looked at how slow disk operations are yet).
I am using that idea in practice. Virtual machines are generally great for development.
To run on multiple operating systems and multiple separate development environments.
Preserver older development environments for later support.
Can be easily backed up, when hard drive crashes no need to start from beginning.
Can be copied from developer to another, so everyone don't have to do tedious installations and configurations.
Down sides are:
Virtual machines are slower, you need more powerful computers than you would need otherwise. I would recommend having at least 4 G of ram, but preferably more like 16, fast multi core processors and fast hard drives.
Copying Windows OS virtual machines, each used copy of virtual machine should have it's own product key. When you make a copy, it needs to be registered with new product key.
Did you think about a software configuration manager like ansible, chef or puppet? With such software automation of such tasks is very easy! It can even create fresh vm and then configure it.