macfisher/scotch-box

Scotch Box

Check out the official docs at: box.scotch.io

Read the getting started article

Read the 2.0 release article

Read the 2.5 release article

Scotch Box is a preconfigured Vagrant Box with a full array of LAMP Stack features to get you up and running with Vagrant in no time.

A lot of PHP websites and applications don’t require much server configuration or overhead at first. This box should have all your needs for doing basic development so you don’t have to worry about configuring Vagrant and you can simply focus on your code.

No provisioning tools or setup is really even required with Scotch Box. Since everything is packaged into the box, running “vagrant” is super fast, you’ll never have to worry about your environment breaking with updates, and you won’t need Internet to code.

What and Why

Vagrant is an extremely powerful tool. With Chef or Puppet and Vagrant, you can configure any type of server environment you can think of. The possibilities are endless (especially with Docker in the picture now, too). Speaking candidly though, most the development I do doesn't really stray from a default LAMP stack, and when I have to configure a server, I really am always just setting up a boring typical LAMP stack anyways. All I really want is PHP 5.6 and a bunch of modules with zero hassle or overhead.

I used to use this seriously awesome Vagrant LAMP Stack that I even wrote about here. The problem with this is it broke a lot. It broke when Vagrant updated, it broke when Chef updated, and it broke when Berkshelf updated. On top of that, I always had problems getting it working on Windows. There are just too many points of failures for what it's purpose was for me - simply just developing locally.

So that's why I decided to build a Vagrant LAMP Box. The box is prepackaged and requires provisioning and no configuration. You simply boot it up and it just works. It's not for every project, but it sure will help you get straight to it with a lot of them.

Are you new to Vagrant? If you're new to Vagrant, check out our getting started guide with Vagrant article, our Vagrant Share article, and our article on Laravel’s Vagrant stack Homestead. If you follow the first tutorial, you can just learn the Vagrant commands but use the Scotch Box instead.

Features

System Stuff

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr)
• PHP 5.6
• Ruby 2.2.x
• Vim
• Git
• cURL
• GD and Imagick
• Composer
• Beanstalkd
• Node
• NPM
• Mcrypt

Database Stuff

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite

Caching Stuff

• Redis
• Memcache and Memcached

Node Stuff

• Grunt
• Bower
• Yeoman
• Gulp
• Browsersync
• PM2

Laravel Stuff

• Laravel Installer
• Laravel Envoy
• Blackfire Profiler

Other Useful Stuff

• No Internet connection required
• PHP Errors turned on
• Laravel and WordPress ready
• Operating System agnostic
• Goodbye XAMPP / WAMP
• New Vagrant version? Update worry free. ScotchBox is very reliable with a lesser chance of breaking with various updates
• Super easy database access and control
• Virtual host ready
• PHP short tags turned on
• H5BP’s server configs
• MIT License

Get Started

• Download and Install Vagrant
• Download and Install VirtualBox
• Clone the Scotch Box GitHub Repository
• Run vagrant up
• Access Your Project at http://192.168.33.10/

Basic Vagrant Commands

Start or resume your server

vagrant up

Pause your server

vagrant suspend

Delete your server

vagrant destroy

SSH into your server

vagrant ssh

Database Access

MySQL

• Hostname: localhost or 127.0.0.1
• Username: root
• Password: root
• Database: scotchbox

PostgreSQL

• Hostname: localhost or 127.0.0.1
• Username: root
• Password: root
• Database: scotchbox
• Port: 5432

MongoDB

• Hostname: localhost
• Database: scotchbox
• Port: 27017

SSH Access

• Hostname: 127.0.0.1:2222
• Username: vagrant
• Password: vagrant

Mailcatcher

Just do:

vagrant ssh
mailcatcher --http-ip=0.0.0.0

Then visit:

http://192.168.33.10:1080

Updating the Box

Although not necessary, if you want to check for updates, just type:

vagrant box outdated

It will tell you if you are running the latest version or not, of the box. If it says you aren't, simply run:

vagrant box update

Setting a Hostname

If you're like me, you prefer to develop at a domain name versus an IP address. If you want to get rid of the some-what ugly IP address, just add a record like the following example to your computer's host file.

192.168.33.10 whatever-i-want.local

Or if you want "www" to work as well, do:

192.168.33.10 whatever-i-want.local www.whatever-i-want.local

Technically you could also use a Vagrant Plugin like Vagrant Hostmanager to automatically update your host file when you run Vagrant Up. However, the purpose of Scotch Box is to have as little dependencies as possible so that it's always working when you run "vagrant up".

Configuration

You may want to change some of the out-of-the-box configurations for the various parts that come with Scotch Box. To do so, vagrant ssh into the box, and edit the appropriate file. For example, to change PHP settings:

vagrant ssh
sudo vim /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/user.ini

Note that the changes that you make will be for the current running Scotch Box only. If you vagrant destroy and then vagrant up your box again, these manual configuration changes will be lost.

If you prefer to automate your configuration changes so that you can destroy and re-create boxes as needed, Vagrant allows you to create a "provision script" that runs as part of vagrant up. See the Vagrant documentation for notes. For example, you could add the following line to your Vagrantfile under the config.vm.hostname = "scotchbox" line:

config.vm.provision :shell, path: "bootstrap.sh"

and then create bootstrap.sh with the following content in the same directory as the Vagrantfile:

#!/bin/bash
# Disable Zend OPcache
sed -i 's/;opcache.enable=0/opcache.enable=0/g' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

This script will be run each time you vagrant up, and it can be run on an already-up box using vagrant provision.

PHP7 Install Instructions

sudo apt-get update
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get install php7.0
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php7.0-mysql libapache2-mod-php7.0
sudo a2dismod php5
sudo a2enmod php7.0
sudo apachectl restart

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2014-2015 Nicholas Cerminara, scotch.io, LLC

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.