1240828 - single vagrant vm name makes reviewing hard

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Setup / Install, enhancement)

Description

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

We currently use vagrant to set up developer environments. That's great. Yay. However, the name of the vagrant vm is hard-coded in the Vagrantfile (vagrant.vm.define) and thus it's very difficult to test PRs without hosing your developer environment because you can't bring up a separate vagrant vm.

This bug covers figuring out how to fix things such that you can test a PR that does crazy things without hosing your developer environment.

Comment 1

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I don't see any vagrant sub commands for backing up or restoring vms.

Maybe use virtualbox snapshots, but I've always had lousy luck with them, so someone would have to write down exactly what the steps are to make it work.

We could change line 33 in the Vagrantfile:

    config.vm.define 'developer-local'

to this:

    config.vm.define 'developer-local' + ENV['VAGRANT_VM_NAME']

allowing you to do something like:

    VAGRANT_VM_NAME=1119433 vagrant up

but that's kind of clunky.

I think I want a quick-and-dirty solution for now just to make it easier figuring the near future we're probably going to be doing something completely different for dev environments anyhow.

Any other ideas?

Comment 2

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Jannis pointed out that vagrant has a snapshot subcommand in 1.8+. I'll check that out.

Comment 3

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

Removing Vagrant and switching to Docker (bug 1218563), which has its own problems and solutions for reviewing PRs.

Comment 4

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Hooray!