Using Vagrant

Vagrant can be used for testing the provisioning and deployment processes locally. You will need a recent version of Vagrant installed, as well as Ansible. Vagrant also requires a VM provider, and ours is set up to work with Virtualbox. Tested with Ansible 2.7, Vagrant 2.1.1 and Virtualbox 5.2.10.

Vagrant will create a virtual Ubuntu server on your local machine that behaves like a real server. You can then use it to test Ansible playbooks and general sysadmin operations in a dev environment.

Starting the Vagrant server

To create and start up your VM (virtual machine), use this command from inside your local ofn-install directory:

vagrant up

You can then run a full setup, provision, and deploy of the virtual server with this command:

ansible-playbook site.yml --limit vagrant

This operation can take about 20 minutes! If everything was successful, you can then see the site at http://localhost:8080/. Be aware that the installation of a TLS certificate is skipped here, you can only test https connections on a live server.

With the server set up, it will then behave like an OFN production server, so you can test operations like deploying a specific release version to the server with the deploy playbook:

ansible-playbook playbooks/deploy.yml --limit vagrant -e "git_version=v1.30.0"

In the above example we are deploying v1.30.0. See releases here: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/releases

Vagrant general usage

The following commands are useful for managing your virtual server with Vagrant:

# Shut down the VM:
vagrant halt

# Restart the VM:
vagrant reload

# Delete the VM:
vagrant destroy

You can also connect to the VM via SSH using the command: vagrant ssh.

Continue with the Administration of your application server.