905834 - [research] Vagrant setup for kitsune

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Code Quality, task, P3)

Description

[Shuhao]

A Vagrant box setup will help new contributors. I'm doing this today as my setup broke. Hopefully I will get something that works with everyone. 

Right now this is just research. My main focus is to get a working dev environment and complete my current tasks. If I have some extra time to package this into something workable (or if what I will have in a bit will already be close to ready for general consumption), I will try to push it out.

Comment 1

[Shuhao]

Probably 2 points. Setup is hard (not that bad, actually).

Putting in backlog as it is not really a priority.

Comment 2

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

So, a while back, Tim and I spent a bunch of time working on a vagrant setup for SUMO. We abandoned the work for three reasons:

1. We're trading SUMO setup problems for Vagrant setup problems. At the time Vagrant had a decent number of setup problems, so we weren't really gaining anything.

2. Many of our contributors are not on high-bandwidth connections and downloading Vagrant images sucks.

3. We discovered after talking to other teams that there's a fair bit of maintenance required to keep the Vagrant images working. If they're not working, then they're not useful. Further, we had no test infrastructure to verify that they were correct at any given time.


Given the number of contributors we currently have and the fact that no one shows up asking if we have Vagrant images and the fact that the OpenHatch folks had a hell of a time with their contributors getting Vagrant images of their stuff working, we decided it wasn't something worth pursuing.

I'll grant that item 1 may be better now, but the other two are still issues. I personally have no interest in maintaining Vagrant images right now.

I'm a big -1 on this.

Comment 3

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

Er, I'm a big -1 on this unless someone wants to commit to maintain the Vagrant setup going forward. If someone is willing to do that, then that's fine by me. However, if it ends up on my plate again, unless there's a hugely compelling reason to do otherwise, I'll let it die.

Comment 4

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

Vagrant images might be very useful for setting up testing on Travis. It is a common enough use case that I bet they either have support for it or someone has written about it. This would give us a reason to maintain the Vagrant setup and keep it running, if that's true.

That being said, I wouldn't switch my local dev instance to Vagrant if this works, mainly because my environment works well now.

Comment 5

[Shuhao]

I like the idea of any kind of image as it would vastly simplify my laptop setup. Isolation is good imo.

This also helps with setup as it only takes about 3 commands to setup now.

I would of course maintain this, but I don't know how much time I can devote to keeping this up to date as I don't think I'll have time to track all changes for SUMO after I leave. Since my setup will presumably work after I set it up, I won't want to reinstall very often, which is frequently required to find out if the bootstrap script needs to be updated.

That said, I'm still willing to maintain the vagrant image, though it might lag behind a little, which may or may not be acceptable. If someone needinfo me when there is a major change in package requirements and what not, I can make the necessary changes relatively quickly, though.

Comment 6

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

I spent Wednesday working on vagrant stuff for Fjord. It uses the shell provisioner. The work isn't done--probably needs another day or two to work out the shell script, add the missing bits, test on OSX and Windows and also to write the documentation that walks through how to use the resulting VM.

Anyhow, what I've got so far is here:

https://github.com/willkg/fjord/tree/vagrantify

It's heavily inspired by the DXR stuff here:

https://github.com/mozilla/dxr/blob/master/vagrant_provision.sh
https://dxr.readthedocs.org/en/latest/getting-started.html

Hope that helps!

Comment 7

[Dean Johnson [:deanj]]

Blocked by 1035319 due to performance issues without moving vendor/ packages to peep.

Comment 8

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

Landed on master:
https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/commit/0929579b5852fe6d9fb045f20283de413304b6d6
https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/commit/0f6b7391559d917b21fb73ae2479c873dfcac96f

This doesn't have to be deployed to be useful. Closing.