Setting up Octopress with Vagrant and rbenv

3 minute read

I recently got hands on an abandonned laptop that was better than the one I was currently using for my personnal hackings, so I decided to switch to this one. I felt this was the time to learn Vagrant and save me some time later on. I settled on creating a Vagrant environment for this Octopress blogging. That proved a lot longer than I thought it would.

Vagrant logo + Octopress logo

If you want to jump to the solution, just have a look at this git change. Here is the slightly longer version.

  • Add a Vagrantfile and setup a VM. There are explainations about how to do this all over the web, that was easy.

  • Provision your VM. That proved a lot more complex. There are a lot of examples using variants of Chef, but the steep learning curve for Chef seemed unneccessarily complex compared to what I wanted to do. Eventually, I figured it out using simple shell provisioning.

  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
    echo "Updating package definitions"
    sudo apt-get update

    echo "Installing git and build tools"
    sudo apt-get -y install git autoconf bison build-essential libssl-dev libyaml-dev libreadline6-dev zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm3 libgdbm-dev
  SHELL

  config.vm.provision "shell", privileged: false, inline: <<-SHELL
    git config --global user.name "john.doe"
    git config --global user.email "john.doe@mail.com"

    if [ ! -d "$HOME/.rbenv" ]; then
      echo "Installing rbenv and ruby-build"

      git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
      git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build

      echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
      echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

    else
      echo "Updating rbenv and ruby-build"

      cd ~/.rbenv
      git pull

      cd ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
      git pull
    fi

    export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
    eval "$(rbenv init -)"

    if [ ! -d "$HOME/.rbenv/versions/2.2.0" ]; then
      echo "Installing ruby"

      rbenv install 2.2.0
      rbenv global 2.2.0

      gem update --system
      gem update

      gem install bundler
      bundle config path vendor/bundle

      rbenv rehash
    fi

    cd /vagrant
    bundle install

    if [ ! -d "/vagrant/_deploy" ]; then
      bundle exec rake setup_github_pages["git@github.com:philou/philou.github.com"]
      git checkout . # Revert github deploy url to my domain
      cd _deploy
      git pull origin master # pull to avoid non fast forward push
      cd ..
    fi
  SHELL
  • Setup port forwarding. That should have been simple … after forwarding port 4000 to 4000, I could still not manage to access my blog preview from the host machine. After searching throughout the web for a long time, I eventually fixed it with by adding --host 0.0.0.0 to the rackup command line in Octopress Rackfile

  • Setup ssh forwarding. In order to be able to deploy to github pages with my local ssh keys, I added the following to my Vagrantfile.

  # The path to the private key to use to SSH into the guest machine. By
  # default this is the insecure private key that ships with Vagrant, since
  # that is what public boxes use. If you make your own custom box with a
  # custom SSH key, this should point to that private key.
  # You can also specify multiple private keys by setting this to be an array.
  # This is useful, for example, if you use the default private key to
  # bootstrap the machine, but replace it with perhaps a more secure key later.
  config.ssh.private_key_path = "~/.ssh/id_rsa"

  #  If true, agent forwarding over SSH connections is enabled. Defaults to false.
  config.ssh.forward_agent = true
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
vagrant reload

I’ll tell you if this does not do the trick.

I admit it was a lot longer than I expected it to be, but at least now it’s repeatable !

The Docker logo

Next steps will be to use Docker providers and Dockerfile to factorize provisioning and speedup up VM startup.

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