There are times that you might need / want to use a specific provider for your Vagrant boxes that differs from VirtualBox or whatever provider you have set on your VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER environmental variable. For experienced Ruby users this might seem something trivial to do but since Vagrant’s community is made of people from many different programming languages background, I thought it would be nice to share this little trick I find useful when I need to make sure the VMs goes up with the right provider. Read more

I’ve been playing a lot with Docker recently and while learning more about it I came across “Another Union File System” (AUFS) + its Copy On Write (COW) capabilities and have been pretty impressed by it. In short, by using a COW + union file system Docker makes things really cheap when it comes to disk usage. The idea of COW filesystems along with a couple GitHub issues, some tweets exchanged with @rcarmo and this post on improvements made on lxc-clone was enough to trigger my interest on BTRFS and I went out to learn more about it. Read more

A while ago I stumbled across this benchmark by Brandon Liu on StackMachine’s blog comparing the numbers for performing some typical tasks on his physical machine and doing the same thing using virtual machines. The measurements were made using Discourse and compared the numbers of doing things on VirtualBox and VMware Fusion so I got curious to see how well vagrant-lxc shared folders would perform. What I ended up finding is that it seems that Discourse provides a base box that was configured by hand and the Chef cookbooks used only deal with some basic stuff and I’d have to either do things by hand or write some provisioning scripts on my own. Read more

I’ve been trying to publish my Dokku Cookbook to Opscode Community since I open sourced it a couple weeks ago but didn’t have much success until last night. The initial configuration was not so straightforward to me so I thought I’d write it down in case I need to do it again. The information on this post is probably documented somewhere but I failed to find it, feel free to comment with links to official docs or other blog posts related :) Read more

Although I’ve been writing about and working on a lot of Vagrant related stuff lately, I need to say that I’m not a “DevOps guy”. My day to day job still consists of building web apps using Ruby On Rails and even though I like using Puppet (and recently Chef), my daily work does not involve any sort of machine configuration management. Configuring a Vagrant development environment is not an easy task. Read more