Summary
In this talk I will present Vagrant, a free open-source tool facilitating the manipulation of virtualized environments, and how it may benefit the development of Django applications. This talk is aimed at Django developers of all levels who are interested in getting an overview of the great possibilities Vagrant offers to support teamwork and quality assurance.
Description
In this talk I will present Vagrant, a free open-source tool facilitating the manipulation of virtualized environments, and how it may benefit the development of Django applications. This talk is aimed at Django developers of all levels who are interested in getting an overview of the great possibilities Vagrant offers to support teamwork and quality assurance.
One major benefit of using Vagrant is with on-boarding. Previously, when new developers joined a project, it could take hours or days for them to correctly set up their development environment and install all the projects' dependencies (the correct version of Python, the virtualenv, the database server, the caching engine, etc.). With Vagrant, combined with provisioning tools like Chef or Puppet, it is now possible to easily create a virtual machine with all the right dependencies properly pre-installed and pre- configured to allow anyone to be fully operational and ready to contribute to the project in a matter of minutes.
Another major benefit of Vagrant is that it gives the opportunity to create a working environment for all developers that closely matches that of the production server. This in turn allows to anticipate potential issues when new code and resources eventually get deployed live.
In this talk, I will present some key functionalities and workflows around the use of Vagrant: - installing Vagrant and Virtualbox. - creating a new virtual machine. - provisioning a virtual machine with basic requirements. - sharing virtual machine specifications with team members.
This talk will include a brief introduction to Chef and Puppet. It will also include multiple practical tricks like accessing the VM's database server from the host's machine, setting up useful shell aliases or automatically activating the virtualenv when launching the VM.