Crafty Vagrant

A neat starting point / development environment for Craft-based projects, with Vagrant configured and ready to go, Gulp set up to take care of things like rendering Sass, bundling Javascript, minifying CSS and images, and asset-syncing, and a couple of shell scripts to simplify installing / restoring the database from backup.

Pre-requisites

npm
Gulp
Vagrant
Virtual Box
rsync (optional, for asset-syncing)

Installation

Be sure to follow these steps carefully if you want Crafty Vagrant to behave!

Run the command bash install.sh - this will install and set up everything necessary (including Craft) in your project directory. If this is a fresh Craft install, answer 'y' to the prompt about replacing Craft's templates + config, otherwise - if this is an existing project - answer 'n'.
If this is the first time you've used Crafty Vagrant, open your hosts file and add

192.168.56.101 craft.dev

(the hosts file is usually found at /etc/hosts on OSX/Linux; %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows)

Launch vagrant: vagrant up

...and hopefully (after a short wait while your Vagrant machine is set up) you should be ready to go! The webserver should now be accessible from http://craft.dev/. If Craft backups are present in /app/craft/storage/backups, the most recent one will automatically have been used to populate the database. Otherwise, you can install Craft by going to http://craft.dev/admin/install

Usage

gulp watch when you're ready to start developing: this will watch for changes to Sass, Javascript, or images, and perform appropriate tasks (compiling Sass, bundling javascript, etc)
While gulp watch is running, any browser tabs with your dev site open in will update live (via the magic of Browsersync) as you edit styles, templates, etc. If you don't want live updating, gulp watch:tasks will perform the same tasks (compiling Sass, etc) without the autorefresh.
gulp watch also generates a custom Modernizr build (at public/scripts/modernizr.js) which only tests for features you're actually using in your styles and scripts (and which should therefore be a lot smaller and more performant than loading the whole Modernizr library). Note that this is not updated on every change of CSS or Javascript because that would slow things down too much, so if you add a new feature you'd like to detect you'll either need to stop and restart gulp watch or, alternatively, run gulp modernizr to update the build.
Crafty has a database-provisioning shell script. If you run gulp db:restore, the most recent backup in app\craft\storage\backups will be restored. (Of course, you'll lose any current state of the database, so only do this when you're happy for that to happen)
Crafty uses Browserify to keep Javascript modular. If you haven't used Browserify before, there's an example module in the /scripts directory.

Troubleshooting

If this is a fresh install of Craft, you may see error pages until you've installed it by visiting http://craft.dev/admin/install
Crafty Vagrant will not install properly if the unzip command is not available from the command line. On Linux / OSX this is not usually a problem, but for Windows you might need to get an unzip executable file here and put it somewhere accessible from your PATH.
Vagrant 1.8.7 (the current version at the time of writing) seems to have issues installing boxes on some machines. If vagrant up fails, try installing Vagrant 1.8.6 instead.

Development

If you want to work on Crafty Vagrant itself (ie. on the default config / starting templates), three steps are required:

Run the install step with a --dev flag: eg. bash install.sh --dev. This leaves copies of Crafty's default template / config files in the /src folder (without the --dev flag they are deleted from this directory as part of the install process, to avoid the potential confusion of having an unused templates directory kicking around)
Add the line define('CRAFT_TEMPLATES_PATH', "../src/craft/templates"); to the top of Craft's app/public/index.php file. This lets you work directly on the source templates alongside a working installation of Craft.
gitignore everything inside the app directory apart from app/src to prevent it being checked into Crafty Vagrant itself. We don't want to commit this change, so instead of adding it to .gitignore, edit .git/info/exclude and add the following lines:
```
 app/*
 !app/src*
```

Environment

Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)
Apache 2.4
PHP 7 (with all Craft's required PHP extensions)
Modernizr

Thanks!

Crafty Vagrant's install script uses part of makeItCraft by Matt Stauffer.

Crafty Vagrant is also based on work by:

nickautomatic/crafty-vagrant