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RailsBridge Virtual Machine

If you just want the VM image, downloads are here: http://downloads.railsbridge.org/

To workshop participants: this is the "behind the scenes" stuff that instructors use to create the virtual machine that you will use. You should install the virtual machine image file, not this code. Please follow the instructions on the RailsBridge Boston site to set up your virtual machine.

To instructors and TAs: if you're interested in helping to maintain the VM, keep reading.

Setup of the generated VM

The base box is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS; Ubuntu distributes version 4.3 of the VirtualBox guest additions. We should have students install the same version of the VirtualBox host.

The target Ruby version is 2.0 (latest), and Rails version is 4.0.5. These are set in the provisioning scripts.

We use chruby to build/install Ruby, and invoke it in the user's .bash_profile to set their PATH. It provides a version of gem that defaults to user installs.

Building a fresh image

The Vagrantfile will allow you to rebuild the RailsBridge VM from scratch. Run:

rake up

This just runs vagrant up. The base box will be downloaded directly from Ubuntu if it hasn't already been added. Building Ruby takes a while, so get some coffee.

Then, to create an image file to distribute:

rake package

This will create an image file name railsbridgevm-version.box, where the version is based on the tag you have checked out.

When you are ready to make the "gold master" version that we will ask students to download, create (and push to GitHub) a tag with the year and month of the workshop (e.g. 2014-01) before running rake package. During the process of testing an image, you can run rake package with an untagged commit; the version will then include its SHA and how many commits it is ahead of the last tag.

What to edit in this repo

To keep things simple and easy for everyone to modify, we use a shell script provisioner. There are three scripts:

  • provision-root-install.sh runs as root (installs packages/Ruby system-wide)
  • provision-user-install.sh runs as the vagrant user (installs gems to home directory)
  • provision-root-cleanup.sh runs as root (removes files and zeroes out disk)

We also run the Heroku Toolbelt install script directly as root.

Files are copied into the VM from these directories:

  • binfiles to /usr/local/bin (as root)
  • etcfiles to /etc (as root)
  • dotfiles to /home/vagrant (as the user)

Tests

TODO: There should be some kind of automated test for the output (i.e. can you start the VM, log in, clone a test Rails app, and run it).