Setup instructions for using Vagrant, Oracle’s VirtualBox and Rails 3.
Getting Vagrant to install is easy, since it is just a gem, and it only requires the download of Oracle’s VirtualBox which is a simple OSX package. The bare bones instructions on the Vagrant site homepage actually work, but forget to tell you that you should do this from a new directory that you want to have shared with the VM.
gem install vagrant
vagrant box add lucid32 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
vagrant init
After the vagrant init there is a file called Vagrantfile that is just Ruby code for configuring the VM. Vagrant itself is set up to use Chef or Puppet to configure the VM with all of the software you need, but other than the basic apache install, I used apt-get to do the config.
The following changes to the bottom of the Vagrantfile use Chef Solo to install Apache2 into to VM (it sets up both port forwarding so that localhost:8080 points to apache inside the VM and sets up a local network address (only visible from within the laptop 192.168.10.200 so that I can also set up a direct http connection to apache.
config.vm.box = "lucid32"
config.vm.provisioner = :chef_solo
# Grab the cookbooks from the Vagrant files
config.chef.recipe_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/getting_started/cookbooks.tar.gz"
# Tell chef what recipe to run. In this case, the `vagrant_main` recipe
# does all the magic.
config.chef.add_recipe("vagrant_main")
config.vm.forward_port("http", 80, 8080)
config.vm.network("192.168.10.200")
With that in place the next thing to do is to start it up and then connect to the VM.
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
The last line creates an ssh session to the newly booted Ubuntu VM running inside the VirtualBox. No passwords or anything like firewalls, the VM is running wide open within OSX (but headless so ssh is necessary to connect and do anything useful). The /vagrant directory in the VM is shared with the directory that you are in when the init was done, so it is easy to move files into and out of the VM.
Once on the VM, the it was easy to use apt-get to install everything else that is needed for Rails 3.
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev
sudo gem install rails
sudo gem install mysql2
rails new /vagrant/R3/weblog -d=mysql -J
The -J in the rails command omits prototype so that the jQuery support can be added instead. Note also that the files are created in the /vagrant directory so they are available for editing directly on the laptop as well.
Then all that is needed to validate that it is working is to start rails up in development mode, so
/vagrant/R3/weblog
rake db:create:all
script/rails server
This shows the usual startup messages
=> Booting WEBrick
=> Rails 3.0.3 application starting in development on http://0.0.0.0:3000
=> Call with -d to detach
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server
[2011-01-13 11:27:27] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-01-13 11:27:27] INFO ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10) [i486-linux]
[2011-01-13 11:27:27] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=7784 port=3000
Then using the laptop browser visit http://192.168.10.200:3000/ and everything should be working correctly. vagrant suspend will then pause the VM and vagrant resume will restart it. Using vagrant halt will cleanly shut the machine down vagrant up will restart it, and vagrant destroy will shut down and delete the VM, so the next vagrant up restarts with a blank slate so you can test your provisioning process.
Edited to add The /vagrant directory is set to the root directory for Apache by the chef_solo recipe, so any files in the /vagrant directory on the running VM are visible at http://192.168.10.200/.