Vagrant based development environment guide

[lengarvey]

I want to have a vagrant-based development environment guide so that people who attend installfest can potentially choose a more professional development environment.

This may eventually become the default unless railsinstaller/railsinstaller-nix#20 can be resolved.

[ralovely]

I follow up on our last conversation.
I built a vagrant box with the last stable debian
It's just shy of 310 Mo.

If you want to play with it, you can find it here:
https://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/ralovely.com-downloads/railsinstallfest/rails-dev.box
I also described the config here:
https://gist.github.com/ralovely/a098ae0adf9310f0d6a3#file-config-runlist-sh
I started with a Chef recipe, so we could exchange and play with it,
but Chef cookbooks usually don't care about size: I ended up with 600+Mo boxes.
It was faster to do it by hand than to write all the cookbooks,
but a bash provisionning would be better.

A few notes:

• No RVM: it adds 55 Mo to the box.
  It can raise an issue though: gem install will need sudo, which might be harder to explain in the guides
• Installed Ruby is 1.9.3. There is no stable package for 2.0
• I installed NodeJS as a JS runtime. the rubyracer gem needs python anyway, and node can do more.
• The guides will need to tell the user to configure git (unlike the RailsInstaller path that prompts for it)
• We could shave a few Mo:
  • I installed zsh and oh-my-zsh. Nice but not necessary. But nice. (±8Mo)
  • I installed the gems of a vanilla rails (4.0.1) app (thus preventing a bunch of downloads) (±10Mo)

A few questions raised:

• Do we add the heroku toolbelt ?
• Do we keep the rails gem (meaning we will need to maintain them) ?
• Do we use RVM anyway, despite the added weight ?

Tell me if you see something else to add.
I was thinking about ImageMagick, but it is probably heavy.

cheers.

[lengarvey]

I would avoid RVM but instead go with chruby and ruby-install instead.

I want to get the time to keep working on this myself, as well as test the vagrant installation process on a variety of machines.

[ralovely]

I recreated the box with chruby and ruby-install
(I re-uploaded it: https://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/ralovely.com-downloads/railsinstallfest/rails-dev.box)

326 Mo with ruby 2.0, nodeJS, the gems for a new rails app, and a nice ZSH config.

I also converted the config-run into a script:
https://github.com/ralovely/vagrant-provisioning/
it might save you some time.

I won't be able to help for the test on a variety of machines, though, I only have 2 with the same config…