Wanderlust

At the last meetup of the Berlin PHP Usergroup, Christoph gave a talk about Vagrant. Good enough of a reason to write down or re-cap some things I’ve learned with or about Vagrant over the last two years. Base boxes There are lots of base boxes available, but don’t be tempted to rely on them (e.g. via config.vm.box_url). Vagrantbox.es doesn’t actually mirror images and that is a huge pain. Available base boxes tend to be outdated....

April 16, 2013 · 7 min

Vagrant: ShellProvisioner vs. Chef

In my last blog entry, I demo’d how to get started with Vagrant and the ShellProvisioner. To further illustrate how amazingly simple it is to get started on some Ruby, I’ll convert the shell script from my last blog post to a little recipe for chef. Same objective, we install a PEAR package — but it could be anything really. Follow me. Shell This is the shell script from before:...

June 20, 2012 · 2 min

Vagrant sans Ruby

Development, testing, staging and production — this is how most people devide up different environments for application development. Maintenance and setup of these environments is often not a trivial goal to achieve. Having worked with a couple different code bases and setups over the last decade, I often noticed things like environment specific hacks (if ($env == 'testing') { ... }) in application code and service configurations and a lot of manual labour all around....

June 5, 2012 · 4 min

Deploying PHP applications: PEAR and composer resources for chef

This is something experimental I have been working on for our chef deployments. So the objective was/is to find a sane way to install PEAR packages and install dependencies with composer. execute in chef recipes In chef recipes, almost everything is a resource. In case you’re just getting started with Chef, a list of current resources is available on the Opscode Wiki. It’s a link I put in my browser bar since I frequently work on chef recipes....

February 23, 2012 · 2 min

Cooking PHPUnit (and a chef-solo example on top)

I’m sure most of you noticed that with the recent upgrade of PHPUnit to version 3.6, a lot of breakage was introduced in various projects. And for example Zend Framework 1.x won’t update to the latest version either. When I ranted on twitter someone send me Christer Edvartsen’s blog post on how to setup multiple versions of PHPUnit. It’s really neat since it walks you through the setup step by step and you learn about things such as --installroot on the way....

December 4, 2011 · 3 min