deployments/docs/dev_setup.md

Development environment setup

This project used vagrant for as standard development environment. This should easy setting things up and reduce environment related errors.

What you need

There are 3 things you will need to get before your local environment is up and running.

Git

This should already be installed on your system. If you are using Windows, install git bash for windows

VirtualBox

Virtual box will be used to create a manged Linux VM on your computer. Please install version 5.9 as version 6 is not supported.

Vagrant

Vagrant is used to managed the local virtual environment and provision the VM. MAKE SURE GIT VIRTUAL BOX ARE INSTALLED FIRST!!! At install time, vagrant will integrate with them.

Usage

Once you have everything installed and the projected cloned on your local computer, open a terminal( Git Bash for windows users ) and move to the root of the project.

Chef secrets

This project like many other used secret API tokens that we do want tracked in the git repo. in the root of the project, create a file called 'secrets.json' and populate like so:

{
	"django": {
		"github": {
			"id": "<ID>",
			"secret": "<SECRET>",
			"token": "<TOKEN>"
		}
	}
}

Basic vagrant usage and commands

We will interact with the project using vagrant. The work flow is vagrant up creates a VM for your project and runs the provisioner to set everything up. This command should be ran after the project is cloned or when you sit down to start development. This command may take some time to complete depending on how complex the project is. Once the VM is set up, you may now interact with it. Vagrant will forward ports from the project to the user localhost address. For example with this project, port 80 from the container will be mapped to localhost:8000 and you will be able to access there. If you make a change to any provisioning chef recipes, vagrant provision will need to ran. This will run the chef provisioner on the VM making any changes needed.

Because we use the secrets.json file to store untracked configuration, all vagrant command need to be ran where in the root of the project, where secrets.json lives.

vagrant up

Will start the local VM, creating it if needed. This command should always be ran when a development session is started.

vagrant provision

Will run the chef-solo provisioner. This will need to be ran anytime the chef recipes or roles are changed.

vagrant status

Will show you the status of local manged VM

vagrant halt

Will shutdown the local VM. This should be done when you are finished working on the project so you dont have a VM running in the background eating CPU/RAM and battery. vagrant up can be used later to turn the VM back on.

vagrant destroy

This will shutdown the VM and delete it. This command is useful if you have messed up the VM and want to start from scratch. Or if you are done with the project and want to free space from the computer.

vagrant ssh

This will bring you into the local VM as the vagrant user. The vagrant user has sudo. Use this only for debugging! DO NOT INSTALL OR CHANGE THE STATE OF PROJECT OR VM FROM HERE!!!! that will break the concept of provisioning make chef useless. Also make installation and configuration changes with chef.