Creating a M.E.A.N. Vagrant Virtual Development Environment

Vagrant

Vagrant is open-source software used to create lightweight and portable virtual development environments. Vagrant works like a "wrapper" for VirtualBox that can create, configure, and destroy virtual machines with the use of its own terminal commands. Vagrant facilitates the setup of environments without any direct interaction with VirtualBox and allows developers to use preferred editors and browsers in their native operating system. This blog describes a typical workflow using Vagrant in a development environment.

MEAN Stack

MEAN is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you quick and organized way to start developing of MEAN based web apps with useful modules like mongoose and passport pre-bundled and configured. We mainly try to take care of the connection points between existing popular frameworks and solve common integration problems.

Install Vagrant

• Download and install VirtualBox 4.3.12
• Download and install Vagrant 1.6.4

Windows Users

• Download Git for Windows:
  • Run the installer and "next" through the wizard until the step to adjust your PATH environment.
  • Choose the third option, "Run Git and included tools from within the Windows Command prompt"
  • Important: On the next step, "Configuring the line ending conversions", choose the second option: "Checkout as-is, commit Unix-style line endings".
  • Choose "next" through any additional steps to complete the Git for Windows install.
  • Open the Windows Command Prompt as Administrator

Get the Code

Fork the mean and fork the mean-vagrant repositories on Github.

Clone your forks of the mean repositories to a directory on your host machine:

git clone https://github.com/<username>/mean.git
git clone --recursive https://github.com/<username>/mean-vagrant.git

Change directory to your mean-vagrant directory: cd mean-vagrant

Setup Vagrant

Once you cd into the mean-vagrant directory, you will find a "Vagrantfile" which will provide the necessary instructions and provisioning to setup your MEAN virtual machine. All Vagrant commands should be performed in this directory with your Vagrantfile.

Note: In the Vagrantfile, ensure that the source variable to matches a path of the cloned Mean source code relative to the Vagrantfile: source = "../mean"

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions Plugin

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

Connect to the Virtual Machine

Start the virtual machine:

vagrant up

Connect to the virtual machine via ssh:

vagrant ssh

• The MEAN source code is synced to the folder ~/mean

Start the Mean server using grunt:

cd mean
grunt

Launch your local browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000