After too many bits of time spent wondering, “how’d I make that work, again?”, I’m finally getting around to figuring out how to automate a development environment.  Starting out by doing some playing with Vagrant. The idea is that with each project I build, I’ll set up a script to build out a virtual machine with its dev environment. I also want a set of scripts to build out a deployment environment. E.g., bundle together OWF, a security plugin, the plugin’s configuration, and maybe a custom theme for the OWF instance.  Preferably by doing so in some sort of pluggable way.  E.g., I could mix/match what I want by pulling in bits and pieces from various places.  And then readily have a build/deployment script path for pushing to our EC2 demo instance.

Not sure yet whether the right toolkit is Chef, Puppet, Ansible, …  just have gotten to the ‘gotta have a solution’ level.  Since one of the guys in our office made available some Ansible scripts related to OWF which I’d offered to test/share out with the OWF community, starting there.  Since Ansible doesn’t run on Windows, that backs me up to trying out Vagrant to set up a Linux machine off of my Windows box.  I’m taking Vagrant’s tutorial path of using VirtualBox.  (I’ve had VirtualPC on my box for a bit, but that’s been purely to let me do IE7 testing on a machine running IE9.)

Progress today: got his Ansible scripts running, after some hiccups getting the right version of Ansible to hit my virtual machine.  Oh, and I committed my first potential pull request possibilities to his devops repository.  Like the Vagrantfile that sets up the right version of Ansible…