Document: WM-022                                                 P. Webb
Category: Tutorial                                            2017.12.05

                      Easy deployment with Vagrant

Abstract

   Quite irritated I wasn’t doing this already

Body


   Vagrant[1] provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable
   work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and
   controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize the
   productivity and flexibility of you and your team.



   This is fine and dandy but, I’m not on a team with my side projects.
   I just want to quickly push my code to a server and keep it moving.
   Here’s how I did it.

   1. Installation

      Head on over to HashiCorp’s download page for Vagrant[2] and
      select the build for your OS flavor of choice. After the
      installation is complete, open a Terminal and type vagrant -v to
      ensure installation was successful. If you see a version number,
      you’re good to go.

   2. Setup

      cd into the folder you want to deploy and initialize a Vagrant
      deployment script with vagrant init. This will automatically
      generate a Vagrantfile and it is in here that you’ll customize
      your deployment strategies. Here[3] are all the parameters you can
      use for SFTP (which is the way I’m deploying my projects). There’s
      documentation for Heroku and inline scripts as well. Here’s my
      deployment script for thewebb.blog:

      

      Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
        config.vm.box = "base"

        config.push.define "ftp" do |push|
          push.host = "thewebb.blog"
          push.username = "root"
          push.password = "~/.ssh/id_rsa"
          push.secure = true
          push.destination = "/var/www/twb"
          push.exclude = ".DS_Store"
          push.exclude = ".git"
          push.exclude = ".gitignore"
          push.exclude = ".sass-cache"
          push.exclude = "[documents]"
          push.exclude = "node_modules"
          push.exclude = "package-lock.json"
          push.exclude = "Vagrantfile"
        end
      end



      You can probably guess what’s going on here, but I’ll walk you
      through it anyway.

      I’m connected to thewebb.blog via secure FTP, or SFTP, with an
      SSH key (because passwords are lame). The directory I want to push
      data to on thewebb.blog has a path of /var/www/twb. There are
      a couple of files and folders I don’t want/need on my server
      (mostly the contents of my .gitignore, along with that
      file itself).

      Please refer to the documentation[4] for in-depth descriptions
      about other parameters like config.vm.box (this line is
      required btw).

   3. Takeoff

      I use Node.js for practically everything I do so I added a nifty
      deploy command to my package.json. Here’s the relevant bit:

      

      {
        "scripts": {
          "deploy": "vagrant push"
        }
      }



      And that’s it!

      To be quite honest, me using Vagrant feels like the equivalent of
      buying an iMac Pro to browse the Internet but, their tagline is
      "Deployment environments made easy". And guess what? It works
      damn good. What’s easier than npm run deploy?

   4. One more thing

      When you deploy your project, you’ll see a message in Terminal
      stating what’s happening, but nothing else. It would be nice to
      have a progress bar to indicate…well, progress but it doesn’t take
      too long (for my projects). Also, automatic reading of my
      .gitignore file so I don’t have to manually include what I
      want excluded.

      Another thing that would be nice is something where my server
      could detect changes and run commands. For example, let’s say I
      add new modules to this blog. I’ll have to install them on my
      server as well. Currently, I have to SSH into it and run whatever
      extra steps to ensure updates and I reeeeeally don’t feel like
      doing that. You could argue that I could just use HashiCorp’s
      other tools like Nomad and Consul but 1) it was too confusing to
      set up and I realized 2) those tools are definitely overkill for
      what I work on.

      SO! I have caused myself much pain to create a system that
      allows these automatic updates to happen. Just deploy and your
      server will take care of the rest. During my failed attempts at
      utilizing other tools, I was inspired by the ease with which I
      deployed with Vagrant via a simple file. It’s still in development
      but I’ve been working on it for the past day and a half. Great
      progress has been made, stay tuned! 🕸