In my spare time, I like to try and learn new software technologies. For this I use my Windows laptop. The problem is that after several cycles of installing and removing stuff, the laptop become slow. Its performance keep degrading with time until I take some time to reset its installation and reconfigure things.

Recently, after struggling with ruby installation on Windows I decided to reconsider Linux. Since I needed windows for other reasons, I decided to try using virtualization. I started by using VirtualBox to configure a Linux guest machine. While discussing this with a friend, he suggested trying Vagrant.

I visited Vagrant website and it immediately got my attention for its simplicity. All you need is a configuration file, a small set of commands and the virtual machine is up an running.
Playing around with Vagrant tutorial lead me to the idea of creating a sandbox for each software development experiment or project I work on.

I decided to test the idea of this sandbox on my next project: this blog.
As many software developers I settled on using Octopress/GitHub for my blog.
For this purpose, I needed a Linux machine with the required tools installed and a synced copy of the blog source. After several iteration I got to a stage where I’m able to edit the blog from any computer connected to the internet.
In three steps I’m able to deploy a blog sandbox and start blogging:

1. First, install required tools: git, VirtualBox and Vagrant.
2. Second, clone the blog repository,
3. Finally, start the sandbox by switching to its directory and running Vagrant up

It took me some time to get to a simple and repeatable process. I’m glad of the results as I’m using the sandbox to publish this post. This experiment showed me the real benefits from using Vagrant and I’m pretty sure I’ll be using it in future projects.

Although this post is not intended to be a tutorial on how to use Vagrant or Octopress, I’m going to mention a couple of things I found interesting. I’ll also write about some difficulties I encountered and how I solved them.

What I liked most

• Easy X11 forwarding over SSH connections by adding config.ssh.forward_x11 = true to Vagranfile. With MobaXterm running on my Windows host I was able to display the guest.
• Easy port forwarding by adding config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 4000, host: 4000 all traffic network to the port 4000 on the host machine, was actually forwarded to the guest machine on the specified port.
• Vagrant synced folder enables editing the files from both the guest and the host.

What took me some time to figure out

• Shell provisioner as vagrant user and not as root: using privileged false in Vagrantfile didn’t work for me when setting local version of Ruby via rbenv. I finally settled on chaining a call to a script with the specified user su -c "source /vagrant/vagrant/user-config.sh" vagrant

• Blog preview only accessible from guest, at first I thought it was a problem with port forwarding, but finally, after tedious searches on the internet, I found out that binding the server to 0.0.0.0 in Rakefile was the solution.
  server_host = "0.0.0.0" # server bind address for preview server
rackupPid = Process.spawn("rackup --host #{server_host} --port #{server_port}")

If you’re interessted in trying, the complete configuration is available in the octopress-vagrant-setup github repository.