Creating a Vagrant Virtual Development Environment for MEAN Development

Vagrant

Vagrant is open-source software used to create lightweight and portable virtual development environments. Vagrant works like a "wrapper" for VirtualBox that can create, configure, and destroy virtual machines with the use of its own terminal commands. Vagrant facilitates the setup of environments without any direct interaction with VirtualBox and allows developers to use preferred editors and browsers in their native operating system.

M.E.A.N

MEAN is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you quick and organized way to start developing of MEAN based web apps with useful modules like mongoose and passport pre-bundled and configured. We mainly try to take care of the connection points between existing popular frameworks and solve common integration problems.

❗Note: This document is for setting up a virtual environment on a Unix host.

Install Vagrant

• Download and install VirtualBox 4.3.12
  • Do not open VirtualBox or create a virtual machine. This will be handled by Vagrant.
• Download and install Vagrant 1.6.5
  • Package managers like apt-get and gem install will install an older version of Vagrant so it is required to use the download page.

Configure Environment

Vagrantfile is a main Vagrant configuration. Typically it is supposed to be placed at the root of your project. Just put it whenever you want your box root should be. Additional documentation can be found here.

Cheffile describes sources of cookbooks we use to provision packages you demanded. It's used by Librarian to download all the cookbooks you need including referenced dependencies. Unless you already have it install it using sudo gem install librarian-chef command. To finalize the setup and run your box you should:

• put both of files to the root of your project (it will be the root of a virtual box)
• run librarian-chef install to grab required cookbooks

Connect to the Virtual Machine

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions Plugin

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

Run vagrant up to download, provision and start your brand new box environment.

$ vagrant up

Connect to the virtual machine via ssh:

$ vagrant ssh

To Stop the Virtual Machine

$ vagrant halt

To Suspend it

$ vagrant suspend

Back to init again

$ vagrant up

To reload if it is running:

$ vagrant reload

To remove completly:

$ vagrant destroy

Run Hello World

src folder contains the source code for your project. This example contains a 'hello.js' file that only puts 'hello world!' on your console.

Installed Software

• Ubuntu v14.04 LTS

• Git v1.9.1

• Node.js v0.10.31

• Vim v7.4.52

• MongoDB v2.4.9

  • DB Path: /var/lib/mongodb
  • Log Path: /var/log/mongodb
  • Port: 27017

• Redis v2.8.4

  • Config Path: /etc/redis/redis.conf
  • Bind: 127.0.0.1
  • Port: 6379

• Nginx v1.4.6

  • Path: /etc/nginx
  • Log Path: /var/log/nginx

• Forwarded Ports:

  • 3000 Node.js App
  • 80 Nginx Port
  • 35729 Livereload port