Vagrant, with Ansible and Symfony2

One of the single biggest frustrations that most software developers face is getting started. It's hard enough to get up to speed with an existing project, but that difficulty multiplies exponentially when starting with a brand new project.

In this series on Vagrant, Ansible, and Symfony2, that difficulty will be reduced significantly.

You don't need to know Vagrant or Ansible... or even Symfony2 to get started with this process. It really is (almost) as simple as running vagrant up.

I say almost as there are a couple of other things we need to install first (VirtualBox and Ansible), but they are next > next > next type operations that require very little thought.

What Is Vagrant?

Vagrant is a way of defining the type of server you want.

You use a single file - the Vagrantfile - to specify exactly how you want your server(s) to be configured. This includes everything from amount of RAM and CPU, to IP Addressing, and a build script.

The build script is the trickiest part. Thankfully, we can make full use of everything we have learned in the Ansible course, or just clone the project and get started without editing a thing.

By the end of this series you will have learned how to install and customise your Vagrant set up, and have a fully working nginx powered web site running on Ubuntu, with the latest edition of Symfony ready and waiting for you to add your own code.

Symfony doesn't like to play nicely with Vagrant out of the box, so we will cover how to turbo charge your set up, giving thanks to the Symfony community along the way :)

Let's get started!