Ruby on High Speed Rails: Debian Stable Vagrant box

[Jason Hsu, Rubyist]

My presentation on Vagrant is at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6n9UlfqV3juc3NleW9PdWtydTA/view?usp=sharing

The Vagrant repository that I'm now using for Ruby on Rails development is at https://github.com/jhsu802701/vagrant_debian_wheezy_rvm .  My Vagrant base box includes the latest versions of RVM, Chef, and Puppet.  Thanks to Derek Rockwell for paving the way for me with the Rails.MN Vagrant setup at https://github.com/railsmn/railsmn-dev-box .

Unlike most of the Vagrant base boxes that people are using for Ruby on Rails development, my Vagrant base box uses Debian Stable instead of Ubuntu.  Debian Stable requires only occasional and modest updates.  In contrast, Ubuntu becomes out of date very rapidly and thus requires frequent and substantial updates.

My Vagrant base boxes are open source.  The source code I use to create my Vagrant base boxes is at https://github.com/jhsu802701/packer-debian-wheezy-rvm .  I'm using an open source program called Packer (http://www.packer.io) to create my Vagrant base boxes.  Thanks to Pierre Mavro for paving the way for me with his source code for creating a Debian base box at https://github.com/deimosfr/packer-wheezy .

If you aren't already using Vagrant, it's time to start.  I've been taking action to improve everyone's Vagrant experience, and I'm making Vagrant part of my standard operating procedure for Ruby on Rails development.  My Vagrant setup will be valuable for RailsBridge, Startup Weekend, and 24-hour web site challenges.  Vagrant is especially valuable on Windows computers due to the pitfalls of installing Ruby on Rails in the Windows environment.

[Jason Hsu, Rubyist]

I have released version 0.1.0 of my debian-wheezy-rvm Vagrant box.  Just clone my Vagrant setup at https://github.com/jhsu802701/vagrant_debian_wheezy_rvm to get started.

I have already begun using my own public Vagrant setup and Vagrant box to work on a Rails project.  My Vagrant base box is now based on a minimal Debian installation created with the use of the ror.sh script in my Packer-Debian-Wheezy project at https://github.com/jhsu802701/packer-debian-wheezy .

The most notable changes are:
1.  You can run the shared/test_rvm.sh script (/home/vagrant/shared/test_

rvm.sh) in your virtual machine to confirm that RVM works in the Vagrant base box.
2.  The Vagrant box now has a timestamp at /home/vagrant/timestamp.txt .  I will continue to provide this timestamp in all future releases of my Vagrant box, which I find necessary to confirm that I have the new box installed instead of the old one.  Please note that this timestamp is ONLY visible from within Vagrant and is NOT available on your host machine.