Using Vagrant

We use Vagrant to provide a preconfigured development environment for PullEffect.

To get started, install the latest version of Vagrant from their website and install the latest version of VirtualBox as well.

First, we're going to install a vagrant plugin that will prevent some issues from occurring:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

This plugin ensures that the box you're running always has the latest VirtualBox Guest Additions, which can help ensure the box starts up normally if it's using an older version of guest additions.

To actually install our box, we're going to two commands that will automatically download our base box from Vagrant Cloud and provision it appropriately:

vagrant init wesleyan/pulleffect
vagrant up

Grab a cup of coffee and wait for it to download, install and update the VB guest additions. Once it's finished, we'll connect to the box:

vagrant ssh

A likely out of date version of the PullEffect code is located /var/www/pulleffect, you'll want to update it via git (or copying from your host home directory, mounted at /vagrant, edit the config.json file appropriately and provide a google_clients_secrets.json file.

Once that's done, you can run PullEffect with:

. activate
python runserver.py

And you should be able to open a browser outside of Vagrant and access PullEffect via localhost:3000

WINDOWS NOTES:

All commands listed above are entered into the command prompt(the git shell may also work), which can be found by simply searching for cmd.

When attempting to vagrant up virtual box was not found despite being properly installed. The following message appeared.

Vagrant could not detect VirtualBox! Make sure VirtualBox is properly installed.

Vagrant uses the `VBoxManage` binary that ships with VirtualBox, and requires
this to be available on the PATH. If VirtualBox is installed, please find the
`VBoxManage` binary and add it to the PATH environmental variable.

The environment variable that was automatically created for me upon installing virtualbox had a key name of "VBOX_MSI_INSTALL_PATH." In order to make this readable for vagrant the follow steps must be followed. "My Computer"("This PC" in Windows 8)-->Properties-->Advanced System Settings-->Environment Variables. Here I scrolled down to find "VBOX_MSI_INSTALL_PATH" and I changed it to "VBOX_INSTALL_PATH". Finally, close and open the command prompt, and re-enter vagrant up. The download should begin if all prior steps have been executed correctly.

It is likely that you will be unable to perform vagrant ssh from the command line. By using the [Git Shell] (https://windows.github.com/) we are able to perform the final step in setting up vagrant for pulleffect development. It may be possible to perform all steps listed above within this shell, although it has not been tested. In addition to the Git Shell one may attempt to use cygwin, although this has not been tested.