A vagrant shipped with a docker shipped with an ansible provisioning an nginx.

I've made a post on my blog about what would be my best development environment to start a fresh project. I tried to explain that it would be a mix of all that great stuff pushing up as of vagrant virtual machine, docker container system and ansible provisioning. To know more about it, go check http://goo.gl/ZRudPl.

Docker is an amazing tool but I thing it as some drawbacks. First of all it do not works on every linux systems, you need a minimum kernel version. You'll also need to install some extra kernel modules for it to work. The other main drawback for docker is that the "provisioning" tool shipped by default work only inside a docker image. If someday you need to install your images outside a docker image you won't be able to do it.

That is why I've created this project to show you how you can create a Vagrant virtual machine for your project. So what did this project contains :

1. install an ubuntu trusty virtual machine shipped with docker (see Vagrantfile)
2. share the docker-ansible-nginx folder containing a Dockerfile with an ubuntu vivid image.
3. ship in this docker image the ansible playbook to install a nginx server inside of it
4. allows you to edit only the playbook to ship what you want in your docker image or elsewhere

Launch the vagrant and log in

vagrant up && vagrant ssh

Add the necessary ansible roles

cd docker-ansible-nginx
ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.nginx -p .

Build your docker images

cd docker-ansible-nginx
docker build -t docker-ansible-nginx .

Run your image

docker run -it --rm docker-ansible-nginx

This is just a demonstration of such a development environment. I recommend you to use a more stable docker container project such as William-Yeh/docker-ansible.

By combining the best of these tools, you can easily create your necessary development environment for your projects. Using ansible allows you to deploy them with the same exact version on your production servers.

Have fun. Flyers.