Vagrant and Rails with shared folders on a Windows host

The default (VirtualBox) shared folders in vagrant are slow. So trying to use shared folders for rails development in vagrant can be painful, think waiting minutes for a small test suite to run.

NFS is much faster.

NFS isn't supported on windows. Except it is with https://github.com/winnfsd/vagrant-winnfsd

# Install
vagrant plugin install vagrant-winnfsd

# Edit Vagrantfile
# A private dhcp network is required for NFS to work (on Windows hosts, at least)
config.vm.network "private_network", type: "dhcp"

# add ', nfs:true' to each shared folder

BUT ... NFS is case-insensitive. This means that anything going into your shared folder that might depend on case-sensitivity can cause errors. For rails, this can cause errors like so:

Errno::EEXIST at / File exists @ dir_s_mkdir - tmp/cache/assets/sprockets/v3.0/Pd

Solution - set the RAILS_TMP directory to be outside of the shared folder

First set ENV['RAILS_TMP'] (eg. in .env or .rbenv-vars or directory - however you normally set environment variables):

RAILS_TMP=/path/outside/shared/folder

Then configure this in config/application.rb or config/environments/development.rb:

config.assets.cache_limit = 50.megabytes

  config.assets.configure do |env|
    env.cache = Sprockets::Cache::FileStore.new(
        File.join(ENV['RAILS_TMP'], 'cache/assets'),
        config.assets.cache_limit,
        env.logger
    )
  end

via: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35077463/change-temporary-directory-in-rails-4

Fcrepo wrapper and Solr wrapper

The same problem can arise with Fedora's storage folders. Remember you can configure the location to be outside of ./tmp with .fcrepo_wrapper (and .solr_wrapper for solr).

Testing with engine cart

(If using .rbenv-vars) Add .rbenv-vars into spec/test_app_templates, containing

RAILS_TMP:~/tmp

Add this into your spec/lib/generators/test_app_generator.rb

def configure_tmp_directory
    # Don't do this on travis
    if `hostname`.include? 'localhost'

      copy_file '.rbenv-vars', '.rbenv-vars'
      run 'rbenv vars'

      run 'mkdir ~/tmp'

      injection = "\n  # Relocate RAILS_TMP to ~/tmp"
      injection += "\n  config.assets.configure do |env|"
      injection += "\n    env.cache = Sprockets::Cache::FileStore.new("
      injection += "\n      ENV['RAILS_TMP'] + '/cache/assets',"
      injection += "\n      env.logger"
      injection += "\n    )"
      injection += "\n  end"

      inject_into_file 'config/environments/test.rb', after: '# Settings specified here will take precedence over those in config/application.rb.' do
        injection
      end
      inject_into_file 'config/environments/development.rb', after: '# Settings specified here will take precedence over those in config/application.rb.' do
        injection
      end
    end
  end