For WordCamp Europe 2015, I was given the opportunity to help a large number of developers get set up for contributing to WordPress Core quickly.
The most cross-platform and standard way of doing this is with VVV — with the only problem being large download size and conference Wi-Fi. Thus, we needed a packaged way to distribute a development environment using flash drives or Adhoc networking.
If you’re in a situation where Wi-Fi won’t be a problem on contributor day, great! If you need a solution for this, read on.
Contents for Contributors
Building a base VVV package
Using a ZIP for VVV is important because otherwise the checkout will have too many files to quickly copy from a flash drive or a local. To build the VVV ZIP package, follow these steps:
- Clone VVV:
git clone https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV.git
- In the newly-minted VVV directory:
vagrant up --provider virtualbox
This will download the box file and also download all of the dependencies upon first provision. That’s important because they’re about as large as the box file, and account for almost a gigabyte of data.
- To create a base box that includes provisioned packages, run:
vagrant package --output vvv-contribute.box
- Minus the
.vagrant directory1, zip the folder’s contents, including the newly-minted box, using either the command line or your favorite file manager.
Contributor Steps to Get Started
- Install VirtualBox
- Install Vagrant
- Copy
VVV.zip to local drive and extract
- Add pre-provisioned box to Vagrant:
vagrant box add ubuntu/trusty64 vvv-contribute.box
- Optional, and will download, but manages hosts file:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
- Start up Vagrant:
vagrant up --provider virtualbox
Caveats
- Once a VirtualBox base box has been added manually from a system, it can’t be automatically updated without removing it, and adding it directly from the web. This means that updates to the Ubuntu base box would need to be done manually by contributors if they want to update later.
- This will not solve all potential Windows issues. While it worked with the majority of machines, there were some Windows users who could not unzip the file with native file ZIP utility, or had other incompatibilities with Vagrant.
Feedback
Have any questions or suggestions? Let me know in the comments!
1 Edit (05/23/2016) – Looks like Vagrant is including the user ID that created the box in a .vagrant directory, which is causing problems for contributors when starting up the box on their local machines.
