Tag Archives: vagrant

25 Aug
2016

Vagrant and Ansible for Dev Machines

With my new job came, of course, lots of new projects. They cover quite a wide range of system requirements and so I’ve been creating ansible-provisioned vagrant machines for each one to make it easy to set up on other platforms. I thought I’d share some examples of my setup, in case anyone is interested, but more importantly so I can swiftly look this up when I start the next new project! Continue reading →
15 Jul
2016

Vagrant Box With This Name Already Exists

Due to the unique approach of Canonical to packaging vagrant boxes, the current ubuntu/xenial box has a hardcoded machine name which causes an error when you try to bring up a second VM using the same base box:

A VirtualBox machine with the name 'ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg' already exists.
Please use another name or delete the machine with the existing name, and try again.

There’s a stackoverflow question about this and a good answer (not the accepted one, the highest-voted one) which helped me a bit but it still wasn’t completely clear to me how to fix my problem and I had to dig about a bit. Continue reading →

05 Jan
2015

XHGui on VM, Storage on Host

I’m doing some performance tuning on a project at the moment and my favourite tool is still XHGui – but it’s designed to run on the same machine as its victim and since this is a vagrant VM, the chances of me destroying the machine and therefore the data are pretty high! Instead, I set it up to store the data onto the host and I thought I’d share how I did that. Continue reading →
09 Dec
2014

Status Check on All Vagrant Machines

Much of the development I do these days uses vagrant machines to make sure that my code is running in the correct environment. This is great, but spinning up too many machines at once can rather stretch the resources of the computer you’re running them on – and I keep starting up machines and then forgetting about them!

It turns out that (since vagrant 1.6) you can ask vagrant to tell you which of its machines are running, using the command:

vagrant global-status

Where did all my system resources go? Now I know!

09 May
2012

Using an Existing Vagrant Setup for PHP Development

I’ve been hearing great things about puppet, chef, vagrant, and friends for a while now, but since I work on my own I tend to either develop straight onto my ubuntu machine or grab an appropriate existing VM and use that. So I read about this brave new world of virtualisation but (as with most tools) they can be hard to introduce on your own, and I didn’t.

Then I went to WhiskyWeb, which had a hackathon. I’m unclear on exactly what happened because my attention was elsewhere but it seems like @JayTaph showed off puppet and vagrant to @deizel*, who immediately built a vagrant setup for joind.in, which is an open source project that I’m currently leading. With the shiny new technology all packaged for me, I decided it was time to take a look! Continue reading →