Elixir provisioning for Vagrant

What is it for?

Developers can use a Virtual Machine (VM) for development in order to quickly get up and running with a system that has Elixir installed. Everyone will have the same setup regardless of the host machine.

The VM will have:

Linux (Ubuntu)
Erlang
Elixir
PostgreSQL
nodejs 6 and other dependencies for the Phoenix framework

The provisioning script can easiliy be modified for other versions of the software.

If a Phoenix project is detected during the first vagrant up, the database will also be set up and seeded.

Prerequisites

Install Vagrant ( https://www.vagrantup.com/ )
Install VirtualBox ( https://www.virtualbox.org/ ) or alternatively VMWare.

How to use it

Add the two files Vagrantfile and vagrant_provision.sh to any directory. With an Elixir project in it or not.
Run vagrant up This will take a while the first time as it will install Erlang, Elixir, PostgreSQL and more.
SSH into the vagrant box with vagrant ssh.

The /vagrant directory will be linked to the project directory on the host machine.

Version control

Vagrantfile and vagrant_provision.sh should be added to version control. On the other hand it is recommended to ignore the .vagrant directory. If you are using git you could add this line to .gitignore: .vagrant/*

Phoenix / inotify auto-reload issues

Warning: There are issues with Phoenix auto reloading and Vagrant. This appears to be because of inotify being incompatible with the /vagrant directory being connected to the host file system.

Vagrant can still be used for instance for doing releases of a Phoenix project.

Warning: Hex dependencies

If you do mix deps.get on the vagrant machine it will get dependencies appropriate for that. Some dependencies are only compatible for that machine. This means that if you run mix deps.get on the vagrant machine you can only use those kinds of dependencies on the vagrant machine and not on the host. And vice versa.