ejabberd Development Environment

This project will help you create a VM preconfigured with a environment ready to jump start ejabberd development.

It will have configured all the database back-end supported by ejabberd, so that you can run tests against all back-ends while developing.

Installation

• Install VirtualBox (free) or VMWare Fusion (paid)
• Install Vagrant
• For VMWare Fusion, Vagrant team is selling an extension to support VMWare Vagrant add-on
• Install Ansible (either clone, or brew install ansible seems to work for me, but you may have to brew doctor first)

Running the VM

Commands:

• Use default vagrant SSH key (added by Vagrant at install time) This is quick and easy setup, but insecure. Use a secure key if you plan to expose that VM to network (Outside your development machine)

    ssh-add ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key
  

• Start Vagrant infrastructure:

    vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusion
  

or if you want VirtualBox:

ulimit -n 4096 # see https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/2435
vagrant up --provider=virtualbox

Note: if you have only VirtualBox or VMWare, no need to pass the provider arguments, it will be detected automatically (I think).

• (Optional) Make sure SSH Agent is set to use your main key, with forward, to be able to clone git repository inside the VM:

    ssh-add
    export ANSIBLE_SSH_ARGS="-o ForwardAgent=yes"
    export ANSIBLE_TRANSPORT="ssh"
  

• Create ejabberd development environment:

You can simply ask vagrant to run Ansible to install and configure the needed software:

vagrant provision

Alternatively, you can manually run Ansible play

ansible-playbook --connection ssh -u vagrant -i ansible/ansible.vmhosts ansible/playbooks/ejabberd_dev/bootstrap.yml

Note: I force the use of SSH instead of paramiko, as SSH option seems more reliable.

Building ejabberd to run ejabberd tests

Typically, you can check out the ejabberd code in the projects directory. It will be accessible in the VM (at least for VMware) from the shared folder /projects:

git clone git@github.com:processone/ejabberd.git projects/ejabberd

From the VM, you can then build ejabberd, with all dependencies enabled for development:

./autogen.sh && ./configure --enable-mysql --enable-pgsql --enable-riak --enable-sqlite --enable-elixir --enable-tools 
make
make test

Known issues

For VirtualBox, I struggled a bit with this one:

• Too many open files (caused by synced folder, while using VirtualBox)

Useful learning resources

Ansible is the tool used to create the recipes for automatic deployment. Here are useful resources:

• 20 minutes Ansible screencast

Clean-up of previous Vagrant version

Before having an executable installer, Vagrant was published as a ruby gem.

I had to do a bit of clean-up to make things working, here is what I had to do.

• verify where the vagrant binary sits (if which vagrant returns a gem path, you are on an old version)
• remove the gem gem uninstall vagrant if this is the case
• rm -rf ~/.vagrant.d (I had some weird error messages and no really useful box, so I imploded it)
• then install using the installer

Also useful: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/installation/uninstallation.html

Notes on box downloads

For me downloading a Vagrant box was a bit slow (40KBytes/sec).

To save time I tried using Axel (brew install axel) and got a 5x+ improvement (270KBytes/sec).

I used the following steps for the VirtualBox box download:

• axel -n 5 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box
• vagrant box add precise64 --provider virtualbox precise64.box

I verified the box url here.