Phansible provisionings for PHP-based projects and more

Phansible with vagrant, ansible, docker and npm

I have used quite a few provisionings tools in the past from Puppet, Chef, SaltStack etc. But more recently using containers with Docker. Each one has its pros and cons. Docker was working great until I upgraded my boot2docker VM and kept failing even after a re-initialise each time to do with keys - many others had the same issue. In my search for a solution that worked, it was recommended not to use boot2docker and provision a VM oneself; makes sense. This made me realise that I should provision my own Docker VM for my Mac, that I can recreate if anything goes wrong.

I heard lots of good things about Ansible (and Phansible) from the PHP community and this is one I had not tried. Knowing of Phansible from the community, I thought it would be a good starting point. And it was a great starting point! I got a development environment VM up and running very quickly with the basics: PHP, MySQL, Apache2 (or Nginx). With access to the webserver on http://192.168.33.99/ and mysql on 192.168.33.99:3306, elasticsearch on 192.168.33.99:9200 etc. Dashboard for Phansible.

But for me (and probably most) that was not enough. I needed Docker & npm. After a quick search, Ansible has modules for these too.

npm dependencies

For npm, it is as simple as:

- name: install npm
  apt:  pkg=npm state=present
- name: install global node packages
  npm: name= global=yes
  with_items:
    - bower
    - grunt-cli
    - express
    - socket.io

Docker containers

And for Docker, it is:

- name: redis container
  docker:
    name: redis
    image: redis
    state: started
    ports:
      - "6379:6379"

Now we are cooking on gas!

Phansible allowed me to install xdebug and blackfire with ease, so now I can step through my code for debugging and profile my application for performance improvements.

Custimising system wide apt packages

Edit ansible/vars/all.yml and add to collect on line 4, looks like packages: [vim, htop, iotop]

Customise what roles are installed

eg. Swap from Apache2 to Nginx (or vice versa)

Edit ansible/playbook.yml comment/uncomment roles collection.

Profiling with Blackfire

Add your credentials to ansible/vars/all.yml and install the Blackfire chrome extension.

Debugging your Application / Stepping through code

This will be covered in another post.

Topic:

• Debugging your code via the browser with xdebug
• Debugging command line code (cli) with xdebug including Behat tests

Full code can be found on Github repo

Suggestions / contributions etc all welcome.