Building a LAMP Environment with Vagrant + Chef

Purpose

Use Vagrant and Chef to build a LAMP environment in a local virtual machine.

Background

When you’re working on a shared server, you might think
“I’d love to upgrade MySQL and run some performance tests”,
but doing so would inconvenience everyone else, and you can’t just get a new server bought for you.
In situations like that,
you can try things out in a local environment.

That’s why I introduced this setup.

Environment

• MacOSX Mavericks
• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

Prerequisites

The following must be installed:

• Vagrant
• VirtualBox
• Chef
• knife-solo

↑ For the installation steps, I referred to the dotinstall lessons listed in the “Afterword” at the very bottom.

1. Initialize knife-solo

$ knife configure

You’ll be asked a bunch of questions, but basically you can just hit [Enter] repeatedly without any problems.

2. Add a BOX

A BOX is the base image file used when launching a virtual machine.

Add a box named centos64.

$ vagrant box add centos64 http://developer.nrel.gov/downloads/vagrant-boxes/CentOS-6.4-i386-v20131103.box

• If you want to match the server environment you’re using, it’s a good idea to log in to your server and run the following to check its environment information.

$ uname -a

You can choose a box URL from the following site.
http://www.vagrantbox.es/

3. Initialize the Virtual Environment

$ mkdir [vagrant用ディレクトリ]
$ cd  [vagrant用ディレクトリ]
$ vagrant init centos64

On success, you’ll see that a Vagrantfile has been created.

$ ls
$ Vagrantfile

4. Edit the Vagrantfile

Configure the private network so that you can access it from your local environment.

This is access from MacOS → VirtualBox.

Just uncomment the line as shown below!

#config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.33.10"
config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.33.10"

5. Start the Virtual Environment

Run the following in the directory that contains the Vagrantfile.

$ vagrant up

Running the following shows “running(virtualbox)”, which lets you confirm that it’s up and running.

$ vagrant status

Current machine states:

default                   running (virtualbox)

The VM is running. To stop this VM, you can run `vagrant halt` to
shut it down forcefully, or you can run `vagrant suspend` to simply
suspend the virtual machine. In either case, to restart it again,
simply run `vagrant up`.

Log in with the following.

$ vagrant ssh

After logging in, run the following when you want to log out.

$ exit

6. Create an ssh Alias

$ vagrant ssh-config --host [sshエイリアス] >> ~/.ssh/config

You can then access it with the following.

$ ssh [sshエイリアス]

You can also confirm that it has been written to the ssh config by running the following.

$ cat ~/.ssh/config

7. Create a Chef Repository

I think the following structure is easy to manage, so let’s create it like this.

|
+---  [vagrant用ディレクトリ]
|
+---  [chef-repo]

Move one level up from the [vagrant directory] and run the following.

$ knife solo init [Chefのリポジトリ名]

8. Make the Virtual Machine Chef-ready

$ cd [Chefのリポジトリ名]
$ knife solo prepare [sshエイリアス]

9. Create a cookbook

$ knife cookbook create [cookbook名] -o site_cookbooks/

10. Describe the Environment Settings to Build in the cookbook

$ vim [Chefのリポジトリ名]/[cookbook名]/recipe/default.rb

11. Specify the recipe to Run

$ vim [Chefのリポジトリ名]/nodes/[sshエイリアス名].json

{
  "run_list": ["recipe[[cookbook名]]"]
}

12. Create a Template

$ vim [Chefリポジトリ名]\[cookbookの名前]\template\default\index.html.erb

Feel free to edit the contents of index.html.erb however you like.

As an example:

<h1>Hello, World</h1>

13. Apply the cookbook to the Vagrant Virtual Environment

$ knife solo cook [sshエイリアス名]

13. Access the Web Server of the Virtual Environment You Configured

Access http://192.168.33.10 in your browser.

Confirm that the following is displayed in the browser!

Hello, World

Also, when you access the virtual environment, you can confirm that the following file has been created, so give it a try.

$ vagrant ssh
$ cd /var/www/html/
$ ls

index.html

Afterword

Going through the following dotinstall lessons first makes this easier to get into.

• essons/basic_vagrant
• lessons/basic_chef