Introducing vagrant-roller

I have been working on a little project recently to enable me to spin up a fully configured and installed Apache roller system in a matter of minutes. The project has taken me a couple of evenings so far but is now in a position where it's worth sharing.

What is it?

Very simple - it's a Vagrant project which uses a Puppet provisioner to:

Create an Ubuntu VM
Install a JDK, Apache Tomcat 6 and MySQL Database
Deploy the Apache Roller webapp and write out the various required configuration files

Why did I create this?

To provide a quick and easy means to test drive Roller - this will make testing migrations between versions easier and more predictable.
To provide a convenient and sandboxed way to author and test Roller themes - until now I have had only a single Roller install (this site), so it's useful to be able to have more freedom in what I can easily change, knowing that I can simply blow away the changes and start again should I need to.
To provide some Puppet code with which a Roller install may be automated. I figured it's time to practise what I preach professionally. 'Work of art' environments (i.e. hand crafted, unreproducible and each one slightly different to the last) are the last thing that any self-respecting devops or software engineer wants. Although I set this site up many years ago as an experiment it's about time that I made it easily and autonomously reproducible for that 'not if but when' moment.

Installing and configuring Roller isn't particularly difficult but it can be somewhat time consuming and fiddly, particularly to Roller newcomers or those unfamiliar with the technology. I hope that vagrant-roller is useful to people who want to play with Roller without wanting to go through the set-up steps themselves.

Go-on dive in

So if you're interested in Roller, why not have a play with vagrant-roller, the project is very much in its infancy right now (only 2 evenings old!) but it works well enough to be useful already so is worth sharing.

I welcome any feedback, bugs, feature requests, pull requests etc that people have, just raise them on the issue tracker.

Cheers,

EdD