Vagrant Box with Ubuntu 12.04, Nginx, MySQL and PHP-FPM

A Vagrant setup to create an Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise 32 bit) virtual machine with Nginx, MySQL and PHP.

Ideal for use as a base box in other projects, so you don't have to wait for the LNMP stack to install when you first do vagrant up.

Contents

• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin, 32 bit)
• Nginx, listening on port 80 and on 443 using a dummy, self-signed certificate
• MySQL, listening for remote connections so you can access it from your host machine, for example using SequelPro
• PHP-FPM

Instructions

Clone this repository:

git clone [email protected]:paulherron/vagrant_precise32_nginx_mysql_php-fpm.git

Navigate into the newly-created directory:

cd vagrant_precise32_nginx_mysql_php-fpm

Now fire up the Vagrant box:

vagrant up

It should come up at the IP address 192.168.50.2, so if you put that address into your browser you should see a 'Vagrant is up!' message to show it's working.

About the Setup

It's not too complicated a setup. There's a file called Vagrantfile in there, which is what Vagrant will take its initial instructions from when you fire up the virtual machine. This file declares a couple of key things: firstly that we want to use the precise32 box to start with, which is that default Ubuntu installation. Then for neatness, we want to use a static IP address for the virtual machine: 192.168.50.2. This will mean we'll always know what IP address to navigate to access our website, and that if we're feeling like it we can also declare a neat testing domain by adding something like 192.168.50.2 default.l onto the end of our /etc/hosts file on the host machine, which would let us view the site in the browser by navigating to http://default.l.

Another key thing the Vagrantfile says is that we want to run the script bootstrap.sh when the machine gets provisioned. It's into that script that we put all of our shell commands for apt-get installing software and moving configuration files into place.

If you check out that bootstrap.sh file it tells the rest of the story. It:

• Declares a root password of 100rows for our database's root user.
• Installs a boatload of packages: Nginx, MySQL and also some other things like Tmux for convenience when interacting with the machine later.
• Moves various Nginx config files into place: things relating to PHP configuration, a dummy SSL certificate, as well as a config file that sets up a site called default.
• Moves some MySQL configuration files into place, and runs a file config/database.sql, which contains a couple of extra commands to grant privileges to the root user and create an empty database called default.
• Moves some PHP configuration files into place, which includes a liberal php.ini file that should allow fairly large files to be uploaded without any problems, and a liberal amount of memory to be available without errors being thrown.

Using a Different IP

If you'd rather use a different IP address, you can specify your own in a Vagrantfile elsewhere. Check out the Load Order and Merging section in the Vagrant doc for more info.

Specifying an IP address for the box to run on is useful as you can access the site on a nice, neat testing URL. I use paulherron.l for my own site, for example, which makes it really easy to switch between my test site and live site. To do this I just declare the following in my /etc/hosts file:

192.168.50.2	paulherron.l
192.168.50.2	www.paulherron.l

Packaging the Box

You could consider packaging the box and using it in your own projects.

With the box running, you can do:

vagrant package --output precise32_nginx_mysql_php-fpm.box
vagrant box add precise32_nginx_mysql_php-fpm precise32_nginx_mysql_php-fpm.box

This should create a .box file that's about 500MB, and register it with your own Vagrant installation.

Using the box in a different project is then as simple as adding this to that project's Vagrantfile:

# A custom base box is used.
# It has nginx, php-fpm and MySQL pre-installed.
config.vm.box = "precise32_nginx_mysql_php-fpm"

# You could optionally put the box on your own CDN so your collaborators can download it too.
config.vm.box_url = "http://yourcdn.example.com/boxes/precise32_nginx_mysql_php-fpm.box"