Armstrong on Vagrant

This repository gets you started with a Vagrant box for testing and evaluating Armstrong.

Warning

This is meant for development and should not be used in production. Period.

Getting Started

TL;DR

gem install vagrant
git clone git://github.com/armstrongcms/armstrong_on_vagrant.git
cd armstrong_on_vagrant
git submodule update --init
vagrant up

Slightly Longer

Install the Vagrant gem and VirtualBox. Once installed, clone this repository and run git submodules update --init to pull in the required submodules.

Once the repository is setup, you should be able to run vagrant up to bring up the VM. Note, this does download a ~500mb "box", so it will probably take a few minutes.

What is provided

This currently provides the basics for the development version of Armstrong. This does not build the box, that's been done for you and saved. The box this installs is already setup with Armstrong and a development server.

The VM that is booted has Django running using the runserver_plus command from django-extensions. It uses a few custom scripts with upstarts to automatically start the server as soon as it has booted and Vagrant has mounted the NFS file system.

The ./armstrong directory in this repository is mounted in /sites/armstrong in the VM via NFS (network file system). Any changes you make to the configuration, templates, and so on, are automatically mirrored inside the VM and runserver_plus will reload the changes.

Questions

Why doesn't this build the Armstrong environment?

From a simplicity standpoint, we don't need it to. From a technical standpoint, pip and puppet don't play nicely with namespace packages. For some reason, pip dies while trying to install armstrong throw puppet, but not directly from the command line.

This issue has been reported to pip (#298) and we'll adjust as necessary.

What's with that .rvmrc file?

Vagrant is a Ruby tool and rvm is a way to separate out different versions of Ruby and different sets of Gems (Ruby packages). It's like virtualenv plus virtualenvwrapper.

The .rvmrc file is used by rvm to automatically start a particular environment. Creating a 1.8.7@armstrong gemset (like its own virtualenv) in rvm is an easy way to segregate all of the armstrong_on_vagrant dependencies.

If you're not using rvm, this file doesn't effect you.

State of Project

Armstrong is an open-source news platform that is freely available to any organization. It is the result of a collaboration between the Texas Tribune and Bay Citizen, and a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The first release is scheduled for June, 2011.

To follow development, be sure to join the Google Group.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

markng/armstrong_on_vagrant