Vagrant: dealing with requirements for a particular version of Ruby etc? - ruby

I am installing a Vagrant machine from a client.
It says that it needs a particular version of Vagrant, Virtualbox, and Ruby, all of which are different from the particular versions of Vagrant, Virtualbox and Ruby required to run another vagrant machine from another client.
What can I do about this?
I would like to be able to run both VMs on my machine, but it's going to be very difficult if I have to install different versions of Vagrant/Virtualbox/Ruby each time I want to spin the VM up.

Best Option: Work with your clients to make each Vagrant project compatible with the latest versions of each tool. For Vagrant at least, I don't know of too many compatibility issues from version to version, as long as the Vagrantfile is written to be somewhat "future proof". The key to Vagrant is the controlled version environment inside the virtual machine. That's the key benefit which lets these environments be shared among developers and on different platforms.
Alternative: Different Ruby versions is pretty easy with RVM. Different Vagrant/Virtualbox versions would be much trickier, but you might be able to install multiple versions and then wrap everything with some scripts. Vagrant under the hood calls the Virtualbox command-line utilities like VBoxManage, so it would just need to know where those are.

Related

"No usable default provider could be found for your system" with VirtualBox

When trying to init a Vagrant box with VirtualBox, I keep getting this error:
No usable default provider could be found for your system.
Vagrant relies on interactions with 3rd party systems, known as
"providers", to provide Vagrant with resources to run development
environments. Examples are VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V.
The easiest solution to this message is to install VirtualBox, which
is available for free on all major platforms.
If you believe you already have a provider available, make sure it is
properly installed and configured. You can see more details about why
a particular provider isn't working by forcing usage with vagrant up
--provider=PROVIDER, which should give you a more specific error message for that particular provider.
After some searching it seems that Vagrant has compability issues with particular versions of VirtualBox. I'm running Vagrant 2.0 together with VirtualBox 5.2 on MacOS High Sierra. Is this simply not possible, or is there a workaround?
Update: It is a compatibility issue between Vagrant and VirtualBox – tried installing VirtualBox 5.1.14 instead and it works with Vagrant 2.0.
You can also use it with VirtualBox 5.2 with this patch:
https://gist.github.com/roktas/ec34960d2e5d74c3cc4f35bc78bc676d

What vagrant really is

I'm puzzled by vagrant because I can't understand what it really is.
As we all know, if we want to run another system in our current system, we must install virtualbox and the mirror of that system such as CentOS.
When I installed vagrant it required virtualbox, so it can't be another virtualbox.
I thought it may be a system management just like bower but the vagrant box homestead which contains mysql, nginx, redis, php and memcache is just over 600M which is less than the smallest Linux system..
So I'm very confused. Could you tell me what the vagrant really is?
From the Vagrant website:
Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases development/production parity, and makes the "works on my machine" excuse a relic of the past.
Basically Vagrant allows you to easily set up a virtual development environment. Everybody can build and configure pre-packaged environments called boxes and publish them for others to use. One of those boxes being homestead.
Here's an article that explains it more in-depth: What is Vagrant and Why should I care?
From the Vagrant website
Create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.
Instead of just installing your software requirements, Vagrant installs a whole development environment with similar hardware and software setup. So you never have to bother with your software not working on some other hardware during development.

scidb installation on single debian server

I would like to try scidb as a replacement for hdf5. I would like to test it on my Debian laptop (no clusters) to give it a try.
Is this possible? Might be that Debian (as opposed to Ubuntu) is not supported?
I had no luck with the installation instructions. The deployment script tells that my OS is not supported. The scidb userguide says about some pre-built packages (for Ubuntu, at least). But there is no hint on how to obtain them.
SciDB is limited to RedHat / CentOS, and to Ubuntu as of the 14.9 release. Folk who want to run it on other distros generally compile from code.
Information about how to obtain the sources (as well as current documentation and community discussion) can be found on the forums here ... http://www.scidb.org/forum/. You'll need to register as a forum user.
Specifically, have a look at http://www.scidb.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=364. There's a list of releases and links to code bundles there.
I installed SciDB several times using several ways (building from sources and installing from packages, installing the cluster version and the dev version).
Installation from packages
First, if you choose to install from packages (the easiest and fastest way), SciDB is very very sensitive about your Linux version. For example, for the last version of SciDB (14.8), if you choose to install on a Ubuntu, it has to be a Ubuntu 12.04 (and not a 14.04, a common mistake) 64 bits (meaning you have to install the AMD64 version even if you have an Intel processor). It won't work if you have a different version.
If you have an Ubuntu 12.04 AMD64, Paradigm4 provides a deployment script and a documentation with very simple steps:
https://github.com/Paradigm4/deployment
Installation from sources
It's not so difficult but it can be painful and time consuming. I did it because we had to compile a custom plugin for SciDB. You have two types of installation: dev install (in SciDB user directory) and cluster install (in /opt/ directory).
You have to be registered on their forum to have the link to the source code. They provide a specific documentation to build from source.
Good luck.
Several months ago I have dealt with porting SciDB 14.12 to an unsupported Linux - Fedora 19. If your OS is not supported, it will neither be supported if you try to install from the sources. You have to start from the sources, but then you have to adapt the deployment and installation scripts. The sources can be downloaded from SciDB forum.
Namely, add a new platform to deployment/common/os_detect.sh. Then, there are multiple platform specific deployment scripts, such as deployment/common/prepare_toolchain.sh, deployment/common/prepare_coordinator.sh and deployment/common/prepare_chroot.sh. You need to make sure those prepare the environment as they would on the supported OS'. I used Red Hat 6 and CentOS 6 as a reference, as those are both more similar to Fedora. Since your OS is Debian, you can first try falling back to Ubuntu deployment (in os_detect.sh).
Another problem you may encounter are the 3rd party tools, specially Boost. In my case, I had to build it manually from sources.
Sometimes when porting and debugging it is not convenient to run the scripts with deploy.sh, but it's better to run the deployment scripts directly on the target machine (e.g. coordinator).
Probably the best way to install and to start with SciDB is to download a standard image. With this image you only have to import the virtual machine with a software to virtualize. Moreover there are some characteristics of this virtual machine that are great to develop your first applications.
The main advantage, is that you have an API to SciDB queries and another to R. Then you can explore all options and to test SciDB.
This is the version that I downloaded few months ago: http://www.paradigm4.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1329&sid=606f614e401900cfa750375ba56de656
Nevertheless, there is a problem, the community is too poor. There are little people developing with SciDB.

Howto upgrade Ruby 1.8.7 to 1.9 on client computers

Of course I know howto install RVM and maintain multiple versions that way, and since I'm a developer I have all the requirements on my own macs (things like xcode etc). Everything is working fine on my own machines.
But how should I distribute my nifty scripts to other mac-users that only have the default 1.8.7 version installed?
I want them to upgrade to 1.9 but I can't expect them to run shell-scripts, rvm (with all its external requirements) etc to be able to run my short 30-line scripts?
Is there a shortcut/tool available so I can get them to upgrade to Ruby 1.9?
Instead of forcing your users to upgrade Ruby, you could package your script into a standalone executable - see SO question on packaging Ruby scripts into Mac OS X applications
There are a few options for automatically setting up development environments.
Thoughtbot's laptop: Laptop is a shell script that turns your Mac OS X laptop into an awesome development machine.
Github's boxen: Automate the pain out of your development environment. Boxen installs your dependencies so you can focus on getting things done.
Pivotal Lab's Workstation: A cookbook of recipes for an OSX workstation.
Thoughtbot's laptop focuses on getting a well-chosen standard set of tools to work on your Mac (you can see which ones in the script).
Boxen seems to be more for teams trying to build their own replicable custom development environment.

Setting up dev server for Ruby

I want to make a development server for Ruby. (I have done this for IIS and a LAMP set up, but am by no means proficient at it.) What will I need besides the actual server (which I already have)? And also any security issues? I know I could dev locally on my machine, but don't want to do that.
First off when doing ruby development the first thing to know is that it works best in a unix like environment, so mac os x, linux, solaris, bsd, etc...
Ruby libraries are distributed and packaged as gems. So you'll want to install ruby and install rubygems. Then from there on you use the gem command for installing ruby libraries.
I'm going to assume you're talking about doing web development with either ruby on rails 2.x or Merb 1.x. The two frameworks are merging in the next release and it'll be called Rails 3.0. So the answer here works for either one. I'm going to say Rails, but i mean Rails/Merb.
Rails development is done locally on your machine. So you'll need to install ruby and all the libraries you need locally. I know many people who use Windows end up using virtualization and running a linux environment for rails within their desktop windows box.
In development most people use an application server, Mongrel. In production the current standard is to use Apache 2 and Passenger.
With rails you're going to want to use source control. Most people today use git in the rails community, but it's possible to use subversion, perforce, or many other SCM's. To get your application from your source control to your staging and production systems, the rails community created an application called Capistrano. It handles deployments. You setup your server information, ssh keys, define access, and then you can release your application with a single command.
cap deploy
It's a pretty good system. Back several years ago now when i was working on odeo.com we had people using windows, linux, and mac's all for development with production deploys to debian linux. It wasn't intentional that our application be cross platform, it just worked out that way because we had people who wanted to add to it, including designers and biz types, who were on windows.
I highly recommend you check out http://guides.rubyonrails.com for more information.

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