Using Vagrant to build a LEMP stack

I may have just fallen in love with the tool Vagrant. Vagrant makes it possible to quickly create a virtual environment for development. It is different than cloning or snapshots in that it uses minimal base OSes and provides a provisioning mechanism to setup and configure the environment exactly the way you want for development. I love this for a few reasons:

• All developers work in the exact same environment
• Developers can get a new environment up in minutes
• Developers don’t need to be experts at setting up the environment.
• System details can be versioned and stored alongside code

This short tutorial below demonstrates how easy it is to build a LEMP stack using Vagrant.

Install VirtualBox

Vagrant is not a virtualization tool. Instead vagrant will leverage an existing provider of virtual compute resources, either local or remote. For example, Vagrant can be used to create a virtual environment on Amazon Web Services or locally using a tool like VirtualBox. For this tutorial, we’ll use VirtualBox. You can download and install VirtualBox from the official website.

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Install Vagrant

Next, we install Vagrant. Downloads are freely available on their website.

http://www.vagrantup.com/

For the remainder of this tutorial, I’m going to assume that you’ve been through the getting started training and are somewhat familiar with Vagrant.

Accommodate SSH Keys

UPDATE 6/26/2015: Vagrant introduced the unfortunate feature of producing a random key for each new VM as the default behavior. It’s possible to restore the original functionality (described below) and use the insecure key with the config.ssh.insert_key = false setting in a Vagrantfile.

Until (if ever) Vagrant defaults to using the insecure key, a system wide work around is to add a Vagrantfile to the local .vagrant.d folder which will add set this setting for all VMs (see Load Order and Merging), unless otherwise overridden. The Vagrant file can be as simple as this:

# -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby :   VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"   Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config| config.ssh.insert_key = false   end

# -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby : VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2" Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config| config.ssh.insert_key = false end

Vagrant creates an SSH key which it installs on guest hosts by default. This can be a huge time saver since it prevents the need for passwords. Since I use PuTTY on windows, I needed to convert the SSH key and save a PuTTY session to accommodate connections. Use PuTTYgen to do this.

1. Open PuTTYgen
2. Click “Load”
3. Navigate to the file C:\Users\watrous\.vagrant.d\insecure_private_key

PuTTYgen shows a dialog saying that the import was successful and displays the details of the key, as shown here:

Click “Save private key”. You will be prompted about saving the key without a passphrase, which in this case is fine, since it’s just for local development. If you end up using Vagrant to create public instances, such as using Amazon Web Services, you should use a more secure connection method. Give the key a unique name, like C:\Users\watrous\.vagrant.d\insecure_private_key-putty.ppk and save.

Finally, create a saved PuTTY session to connect to new Vagrant instances. Here are some of my PuTTY settings:

The username may change if you choose a different base OS image from the vagrant cloud, but the settings shown above should work fine for this tutorial.

Get Ready to ‘vagrant up’

Create a directory where you can store the files Vagrant needs to spin up your environment. I’ll refer to this directory as VAGRANT_ENV.

To build a LEMP stack we need a few things. First is a Vagrantfile file where we identify the base OS, or box, ports, etc. This is a text file that follows Ruby language conventions. Create the file VAGRANT_ENV/Vagrantfile with the following contents:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :
 
# Vagrantfile API/syntax version. Don't touch unless you know what you're doing!
VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"
 
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  # All Vagrant configuration is done here. The most common configuration
  # options are documented and commented below. For a complete reference,
  # please see the online documentation at vagrantup.com.
 
  # Every Vagrant virtual environment requires a box to build off of.
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.provision :shell, path: "bootstrap.sh"
  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 4567, guest: 80
  config.ssh.shell = "bash -c 'BASH_ENV=/etc/profile exec bash'"
end

This file chooses a 64 bit trusty version of Ubuntu, forwards port 4567 on the host machine to port 80 on the guest machine and identifies a bootstrap shell script, which I show next.

Create VAGRANT_ENV/bootstrap.sh with the following contents:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
 
#accommodate proxy environments
#export http_proxy=http://proxy.company.com:8080
#export https_proxy=https://proxy.company.com:8080
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install nginx
debconf-set-selections <<< 'mysql-server mysql-server/root_password password secret'
debconf-set-selections <<< 'mysql-server mysql-server/root_password_again password secret'
apt-get -y install mysql-server
#mysql_install_db
#mysql_secure_installation
apt-get -y install php5-fpm php5-mysql
sed -i s/\;cgi\.fix_pathinfo\s*\=\s*1/cgi.fix_pathinfo\=0/ /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini
service php5-fpm restart
mv /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.bak
cp /vagrant/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
service nginx restart
echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php

This script executes a sequence of commands from the shell as root after provisioning the new server. This script must run without requiring user input. It also should accommodate any configuration changes and restarts necessary to get your environment ready to use.

More sophisticated tools like Ansible, Chef and Puppet can also be used.

you may have noticed that the above script expects a modified version of nginx’s default configuration. Create the file VAGRANT_ENV/default with the following contents:

server {
	listen 80 default_server;
	listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
 
	root /usr/share/nginx/html;
	index index.php index.html index.htm;
 
	server_name localhost;
 
	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
	}
 
	error_page 404 /404.html;
 
	error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
	location = /50x.html {
		root /usr/share/nginx/html;
	}
 
	location ~ \.php$ {
		fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
		fastcgi_index index.php;
		include fastcgi_params;
	}
}

vagrant up

Now it’s time to run ‘vagrant up‘. To do this, open a console window and navigate to your VAGRANT_ENV directory, then run ‘vagrant up’.

If this is the first time you have run ‘vagrant up’, it may take a few minutes to download the ‘box’. Once it’s done, you should be ready to visit your PHP page rendered by nginx on a local virtual machine created and configured by Vagrant:

http://127.0.0.1:4567/info.php