Provisioning project

What did you need to do to provision a vm to run mongo db?

Ensure that Vagrant is setup on your host machine, create a Vagrantfile and configured a server using starboard/ubuntu-arm64-20.04.5 image. Then I was able to create a script.sh to automate installing MongoDB.

What did you need to do to provision a vm to:

Run the node.js application?
Use the nology.training alias?
Use apache server to direct traffic to a given port?
How are you able to pass in the DB connection string? Similarly, set up a Vagrantfile to provision a uBuntu server, again using starboard/ubuntu-arm64-20.04.5 as the base image. Using script.sh I was able to automate the installation of Node, NPM, and Apache Server. The script then installed the required dependencies for the App and started the app running. The script was also used to configure the Apache2 server to add an alias so that the site could be accessed using an east to remember Hostname, rather than the IP address (think DNS).

I faced some issues with working with the HOSTS file, due to using VMWare Fusion and the docs not being clear on how to set a static IP, as a result I had to think outside the box and add a script that would run hostname -I on the mongodb instance and save the assigned IP address to a global file, which we could then access from the nodeapp and add to a .env file in the project, which would be read by the NPM package dotenv.

General Environment Questions

What are development environments?
How do they relate to an application?

Environments are a way for developers to run specific parts of an application in different states, depending on the Environment: such as test or production. Things that we would use different environments for are testing as we would not want to run tests on a production database.

Virtual machines

What is a virtual machine? A virtual machine is a machine that is running inside of another machine.
What does it allow you to do? They allow developers to develop in specific environments, such as linux, windows, or MacOS.
How have you used one? I have used VMs inside VMWare Fusion, UTM, VirtualBox, and hosted on cloud services like AWS, Digital Ocean, and Azure. Managed several two-tier applications, with API's, Databases, and client.

Vagrant

What is vagrant? Vagrant is an open-source tool that helps us to automate the creation and management of Virtual Machines.
What is a VagrantFile? A Vagrantfile is a file that is used to store the configuration details for setting up a virtual machine.

CLI commands

Command	What does it do?	When did you use it?
reload	Reload configuration	When the VagrantFile is changed/edited
up	Initializing the virtual machines	To start/initialise the machines
provision	Takes a shell commands script that will be automatically done by the virtual machine	Used it after initialization or when the shell scripts are edited
destroy	Shuts down the virtual machines	When the virtual machines need to be stopped from running
suspend	Saves the exact point in time of the vagrant machine rather than completely shutting it off	When further work is required to be done on the virtual machines however you don't want to have them run in the background until that work is done
ssh	Allows entering the virtual environment of the the virtual machines	When needing to edit/create/run files that were specific to the virtual machine

Provisioning