Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Very Voluminous Vagrants

vagrant/hobos on the street

Written by

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

in

I finally sat down and installed Vagrant.

Specifically I installed Varying Vagrant Vagrants. I read, like I do, and the directions were thankfully pretty clear for a change about what the prerequisites were, and I found myself with an install of Vagrant up and running within an hour. At this point I joked “Now what?”

Vagrant is yet another tool you can use to create test websites. It’s a super-powerful command line tool one might use instead of DesktopServer or MAMP. Now, I love MAMP. While I find DesktopServer more ‘flexible’ in that I can spin up a client’s site really fast to check it, MAMP is even faster to boot when I just want to see one site and test a plugin on it, in part because I use MAMP No Password and run it on port 80 (which lets me use Multisite).

But… Sometimes when I want to test, I want to test different configurations at once. Like I want to test on current (3.8.1) and trunk, and I probably want a Multisite Network as well. But Vagrant is way more than just a lot of different environments in one go. I mean, if that was all it was, I could edit my hosts file and make a couple extra sites in MAMP or DesktopServer and be done.

What do you get?

You get a lot with VVV, and if all that seems weird to you, it’s okay. The more I work on servers, the more I see a varity of weird setups and the more I want to mess with them for testing. This isn’t to say VVV is perfect. You can’t switch (easily) between PHP 5.2 and 5.3 and 5.4. There’s a whole discussion ticket on the matter.

Vagrant makes multiple servers. Not PHP/Apache instances. Servers. They’re virtual, but let’s be honest, so is the server this site is running on. That means I can mess with the server, install extra features if I need to test a clash with PHP version or add ons or whatever, I can do so without blowing up my laptop (or a real server) pretty quickly. That means my plugins test site (on a live server) may not be needed anymore, which led me to the first actual thing I had to do with Vagrant: Make my own sites.

My own sites!

You get five ‘default’ sites when you use VVV:

That’s four, I know. The fifth is “vvv.dev” which lists the other four sites. That’s pretty much what most of us need when testing. A local site, one on trunk, one using src, and one with grunt for those CSS/JS things.

I needed more:

Those all run stable. I though about naming them wordpress-something, but I needed the subdomains and it was easier to just make multisite.dev for that. I know what it is, and this is for me first. The way you do this is with Auto Site Setups, where Vagrant looks in your www folder and if it finds more folders with the right files, will build sites! Natually that means I made a little Github repo for this called VVV ASS. Because you’ve met me before, right?

What do you do with it?

Test all the things, really. Bang on plugins and code that isn’t right, make patches, and have a generally clean environment to play with. It’s also good for building on (core or plugins or themes).

I’ve been struggling with PHP Unit Tests, as well. I understand them, but I don’t really grok them yet. While I dig the idea of unit tests, creating them is a little complicated to me. Suffice to say, I know WordPress on push day wants to unit test all the things, so I should get used to this.

  1. In terminal, navigate to your clone of the VVV repo.
  2. Run vagrant ssh to connect to the virtual machine.
  3. Run cd /srv/www/wordpress-develop and go into the folder.
  4. Run phpunit

And there you go. What did all that do? A lot. Check out the Core Handbook on Automated Testing. Beyond that, I cannot tell you. Yet. Expect more on that later when I’ve gotten someone to explain it better.

Do I have to use VVV?

Nope! There’s VIP Quickstart, by Automattic (yes, that Automattic) which lets you bring up a WordPress.com-esque site. And there’s WP Vagrant which gives you more testing environments, so when you want to blow up core on PHP 5.2, you can do it easy as another vagrant up.

Am I sold?

Developer Ipstenu is sold. User Ipstenu still likes MAMP best. “Yes, I’ll fix your site” Ipstenu likes DesktopServer. Each has their own place. I’m so comfortable in CLI now, it’s more natural to use MAMP and VVV. DesktopServer comes in to play for me when I need to spin up a site specifically to test an existing site someone else broke.

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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.
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