The issue for me was: How do I do some development at home, and run a similar setup to what I have at work? For this, virtual machines have come along to the point where you can 'box' up a particular environment and run it on any host machine you like.
Pre-conditions: install cygwin tools to allow unix commandline and tools on a windows box. This way you can use the same command line tools on your windows shell as any linux box. While I do like using all types of operating systems, the linux command line is my favourite, and the novelty of knowing DOS commands wore off pretty quickly for me.
Good times with PHP
LAMP can mean a few things, but the traditional setup is Apache, Mysql and PHP. As I have worked along my development path I have found that I am now favoring Python, Nginx and PostreSQL, but for this post I am going to work with a stack provided from the Laravel PHP project. This has nginx, mysql and its php version. Laravel has been on an aggressive development path in it's short history, and now has some very cool development features: built in patterns, unit testing and other good stuff. Laravel provides a tool called Homestead, that uses Vagrant and VirtualBox to make a very nice virtual environment for running Linux on any system, including my cheap windows laptop.I followed the steps explained here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/homestead with the commentary on the steps and modifications noted below.
SSH
From the tutorial, there is a need for a ssh key to be able to remotely login to the Linux OS once it is running in the virtual machine. On windows the path for the ssh keys may not be there, so you will have to generate this key.If you have been using git, there is probably a .ssh folder in your C:\Users\username directory. You will see 'jseller' below, but it's whatever your username is.
C:\Users\jseller\.ssh>ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "useremail@gmail.com"Don't use an empty passphrase, you will want to ssh to the virtual box when its up. When it asks for a path to the key file: Enter file in which to save the key (//.ssh/id_rsa): c:/users/jseller/.ssh/id_rsa
Paths
This is a key point when using paths, I have found lowercase and unix slashes work consistently.So, when you feel the need to type: C:\Myfolder\SomeDirectory, use: c:/myfolder/somedirectory. Like the interwebs, lowercase and forward slashes win.
Running Vagrant
I got an error when doing 'vagrant up' on windows,The host path of the shared folder is missing: ~/Code This was fixed for me by just creating the Code directory in my root folder (in cygwin\windows the ~ directory ends up being c:\users\username)
Then 'vagrant up' started the virtualbox with the output:
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
==> default: Importing base box 'laravel/homestead'...
==> default: Matching MAC address for NAT networking...
==> default: Checking if box 'laravel/homestead' is up to date...
==> default: Setting the name of the VM: homestead-7
==> default: Clearing any previously set network interfaces...
==> default: Preparing network interfaces based on configuration...
default: Adapter 1: nat
default: Adapter 2: hostonly
==> default: Forwarding ports...
default: 80 (guest) => 8000 (host) (adapter 1)
default: 443 (guest) => 44300 (host) (adapter 1)
default: 3306 (guest) => 33060 (host) (adapter 1)
default: 5432 (guest) => 54320 (host) (adapter 1)
default: 22 (guest) => 2222 (host) (adapter 1)
==> default: Running 'pre-boot' VM customizations...
==> default: Booting VM...
==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
default: SSH address: 127.0.0.1:2222
default: SSH username: vagrant
default: SSH auth method: private key
There was some output about my private key being insecure, as the key-gen described above is just a quick way to make a key locally.
Then I seemed to have an issue with mounting drives:
Failed to mount folders in Linux guest. This is usually because
the "vboxsf" file system is not available. Please verify that
the guest additions are properly installed in the guest and
can work properly. The command attempted was:
mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`getent group vagrant | cut -d: -f3`, C:\Users\jseller\vagrant\Code C:UsersjsellervagrantCode
mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`id -g vagrant`, C:\Users\jseller\vagrant\Code C:UsersjsellervagrantCode
The error output from the last command was:
/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error
The issue here was with the paths to my folders, and the backslash escaping the string (see the C:UsersjsellervagrantCode line). I changed that in my homestead.yml to use forward slashes:
/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public
and ran 'vagrant reload' which reloads the configuration.
Success! It started up my virtual machine and configured nginx with the FastCGI for php and mysql database.
You should be able to now ssh to the virtual machine:
C:\Users\jseller\.ssh>ssh vagrant@127.0.0.1 -p 2222
vagrant@127.0.0.1's password:
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.19.0-25-generic x86_64)
Vagrant commands used:
- To start, use 'vagrant up'
- To reload config changes in homestead.yml use 'vagrant reload'
- To shutdown, use 'vagrant halt'
Wrap up
Ok, so now I have a virtual machine running linux on my windows laptop, and laravel/homestead has come pre-configured with Nginx, mysql, and Laravel PHP. It's really handy and I don't have to do any crazy magic with environment variables on windows or other setup, I just run vagrant and I'm self contained in familiar linux.
