GeoKey – Setup a development environment with Vagrant and VirtualBox

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Vagrant is an easy way to create and distribute local self-contained development environments. When developing GeoKey, we used Vagrant together with VirtualBox to deploy a development environment in just under ten minutes. This guide walks you through the process of setting up a Vagrant environment for devolping GeoKey.

Install Vagrant and VirtualBox on your machine.
Fork the repository to your account.

Clone the repository:

 git clone https://github.com/[YOUR_GITHUB_ACCOUNT_HANDLE]/geokey

Copy the directory local_settings.example to local_settings. In the directory local_settings, open settings.py in your text editor and update the database settings to:

 DATABASES = {
     'default': {
         ...
         'USER': 'django',
         'PASSWORD': 'django123',
         'HOST': 'localhost',
         ...
     }
 }

Fire up the Vagrant VM:
```
 vagrant up
```
Log into the VM via ssh:
```
 vagrant ssh
```
Navigate to the shared directory and
```
 cd /vagrant/
 sudo pip install -e .
```

Run the tests, to see if things work out:

 python manage.py test --nocapture --nologcapture

Migrate the database
```
 python manage.py migrate
```
Create a superuser
```
python manage.py createsuperuser
```
If all went well, run the test server:

python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

You now should be able to access the admin interface from your browser via http://localhost:4000.

You have now successfully set up a self contained development environment.

Shutting down and restarting

To shut down the VM and save its state use:

vagrant halt

And to restart it again use:

vagrant up

Troubleshooting

If, on your host machine, the port 4000 is already used for another application, you need to change the following line in the Vagrantfile:

config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 8000, host: 4000

Replace host: 4000 with whatever port you want to use in your host to access the Vagrant box.