AlternC-vagrant

This project is meant for testing development versions of AlternC. It currently expects you to clone the alternc code in the project directory and then to compile a debian package from the source directory (instructions below).

Testing what we develop on the AlternC code is currently a pain in the assphalt! To make sure that contributions are actually working as expected we need to test things out. So with this project it should become easier to do so.

Requirements and initial setup

This project depends on vagrant and vagrant-libvirt. Optionally you can also install vagrant-cachier to keep installed debian packages in cache to speed things up and avoid downloading the same data over and over again:

sudo apt install vagrant vagrant-libvirt vagrant-cachier vagrant-librarian-puppet

Then you should clone the alternc code inside the project (it will be ignored by git):

git clone https://github.com/AlternC/AlternC.git alternc

Finally, you need the necessary tools to compile debian packages (setup of these tools is out of the scope of this readme for more information, see https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild ). For examples, I will use sbuild:

sudo apt install sbuild build-essential
# make sure sbuild is properly setup for building

Dev/testing workflow

Preparing to spin up VM

Before starting the VM, you need to compile the debian packages for alternc. This also needs to happen after every change you make to the source code:

cd alternc; sbuild -d stretch --no-run-lintian

This should produce some files in the vagrant project directory (so outside of the alternc source directory) including some .deb packages.

Link the produced Debian package to the file alternc.deb, which is used by the puppet provisioner, so that the version number doesn't get hardcoded in the manifest. For example:

ln -s alternc-3.5.0~rc1_all.deb alternc.deb

Starting VM and testing the installed alternc instance

We can now spin up the VM and test the instance in there.

vagrant up

Using vagrant-hostmanager

vagrant-hostmanager is a vagrant plugin which will update active guest and, optionally, the host's /etc/hosts file. If it's installed, host entries should the default hostname of the guest, alternc.local, and test.alternc.local will be configured automatically and removed when the the guest is destroyed. Wildcards are not allowed in host files, so if further names are required they must be added in the Vagrantfile.

Note: You will be prompted for sudo access when starting to destroying unless the sudoers configuration listed in the vagrant-hostmanager readme is done.

Using an apt proxy

If the environment variable VAGRANT_APT_PROXY is set, it will be used to configure an HTTP apt proxy in the client VM before the rest of the provisioning is done.

Placing something like the following into ~/.bashrc and re-sourcing it

export VAGRANT_APT_PROXY="192.168.121.1:3142"

will cause the next provisioning run to add the proxy configuration.

Note: 192.168.121.1 is the default vagrant-libvirt network configuration, it may differ depending on the provider used.