[Bf-docboard] Mediawiki and VirtualBox

[Dan McGrath]

Hey Francesco,

A while back, on FLOSS Weekly iirc, I heard about an app that one of
his guests used called Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com/). I haven't
used it myself, but basically you use it to automatically provision
Virtualbox VM's. It's in Ubuntu repositories, and it may even work for
windows (since I think they just call the command line tools/API to do
all the magic).

In an ideal network, you would have some means to provision your
machine/VM from bare metal ("debian FAI", Kickstart, Preseeding,
Ubuntu MAAS, etc.), which would take you from bare metal/blank HDD, to
a fully bootable OS. From there, you would likely switch to using
configuration management (CFEngine, Puppet, Chef, etc.) that would
take you from the baseline image to the current production state.

This Vagrant, from what I understand, does the first part very well.
That is, it will create a VM, set up the ram/HDD/etc and start an
install. I suppose there is nothing stopping you from skipping the
configuration management part though, and just install right to the
final state with Vagrant. Otherwise, you would need to setup a Puppet
server, or similar, to manage your machines. Puppet is pretty simple
to work with from tests I have done here though, but I guess it
depends on how fancy you want to get and how much time you want to
devote to it.

I should mention though that our current environment is (FreeBSD)
managed by hand, so you wouldn't exactly get an identical setup with
these tools. Although, they should get you a "close enough" setup that
fits the goal of working on skins and such. In a perfect world, the
wiki server itself would mirror this type of environment, but that
takes a ton of time and extra resources (spare machines, documenting
existing servers, etc.).

Anyways, let me know if you take a look at Vagrant, sounds neat.


Dan



On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 3:48 AM, Francesco Siddi
<francesco.siddi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
> this is the first of a few of messages I'm going to send to this list, in
> the attempt of further stimulate production and maintenance of Blender
> documentation.
>
> I would like to polish and improve some aspects of the Naiad theme for our
> wiki (customize sidebars behavior, making a mobile version, etc.). A big
> obstacle on my way is the complexity of setting up again a development
> environment (a local wiki version) to test new design and features. I think
> this is also an obstacle for who would like to get involved and move the
> first steps on the technical side, the backend, of our documentation.
>
> My question: is anyone available and willing to help setting up a VirtualBox
> (an OS to be used with a virtual machine, featuring a complete development
> and deployment environment for wiki.blender.org)?
>
> If anyone has suggestion for a better solution I would love to discuss them!
>
> Thanks,
> Francesco
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-docboard mailing list
> Bf-docboard at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-docboard
>