Ruby on High Speed Rails: Debian Stable Vagrant box

My presentation on Vagrant is at:

The Vagrant repository that I’m now using for Ruby on Rails development
is
at https://github.com/jhsu802701/vagrant_debian_wheezy_rvm . My Vagrant
base box includes the latest versions of RVM, Chef, and Puppet. Thanks
to
Derek Rockwell for paving the way for me with the Rails.MN Vagrant setup
at GitHub - railsmn/railsmn-dev-box-obsolete: A virtual machine for Ruby on Rails core development .

Unlike most of the Vagrant base boxes that people are using for Ruby on
Rails development, my Vagrant base box uses Debian Stable instead of
Ubuntu. Debian Stable requires only occasional and modest updates. In
contrast, Ubuntu becomes out of date very rapidly and thus requires
frequent and substantial updates.

My Vagrant base boxes are open source. The source code I use to create
my
Vagrant base boxes is
at https://github.com/jhsu802701/packer-debian-wheezy-rvm . I’m using
an
open source program called Packer (http://www.packer.io) to create my
Vagrant base boxes. Thanks to Pierre Mavro for paving the way for me
with
his source code for creating a Debian base box at
GitHub - deimosfr/packer-debian: Packer configuration to generate Debian VirtualBox image/Vagrant boxes
.

If you aren’t already using Vagrant, it’s time to start. I’ve been
taking
action to improve everyone’s Vagrant experience, and I’m making Vagrant
part of my standard operating procedure for Ruby on Rails development.
My
Vagrant setup will be valuable for RailsBridge, Startup Weekend, and
24-hour web site challenges. Vagrant is especially valuable on Windows
computers due to the pitfalls of installing Ruby on Rails in the Windows
environment.

I have released version 0.1.0 of my debian-wheezy-rvm Vagrant box. Just
clone my Vagrant setup at
https://github.com/jhsu802701/vagrant_debian_wheezy_rvm to get started.

I have already begun using my own public Vagrant setup and Vagrant box
to
work on a Rails project. My Vagrant base box is now based on a minimal
Debian installation created with the use of the ror.sh script in my
Packer-Debian-Wheezy project at
https://github.com/jhsu802701/packer-debian-wheezy .

The most notable changes are:

  1. You can run the shared/test_rvm.sh script
    (/home/vagrant/shared/test_
    rvm.sh) in your virtual machine to confirm that RVM works in the Vagrant
    base box.
  2. The Vagrant box now has a timestamp at /home/vagrant/timestamp.txt .
    I
    will continue to provide this timestamp in all future releases of my
    Vagrant box, which I find necessary to confirm that I have the new box
    installed instead of the old one. Please note that this timestamp is
    ONLY
    visible from within Vagrant and is NOT available on your host machine.