Trying CloudFoundry with Vagrant ... and some patience
This post is an updated, working and complete version of an older one I published mistakenly.
I suppose you have a functional ruby env for installing Vagrant, and that you have VirtualBox v4.1 already installed.
Let’s go!
mkdir ~/cloudfoundry cd ~/cloudfoundry #(optional) rvm 1.9.2@vagrant --create gem install vagrant vagrant box add ubuntu-lucid-64 http://s3.lds.li/vagrant/lucid64.box vagrant init ubuntu-lucid-64 vagrant up
NB: if you’re getting a general protection fault: 0000 [#3] SMP error, it might be the sign you’re running an other virtualization system on
this host (see this post about VirtualBox + kvm errors)
Then connect to your VM with vagrant ssh.
I used to install RVM manually and then install CloudFoundry step by step, manually too. But now the community provided a good install script, so let’s use it directly.
Before that, we should just fix a problem in our Vagrant image, the /home/vagrant/.gem is owned by root:root:
sudo chown vagrant:vagrant /home/vagrant/.gem -R
Then we follow the standard installation steps mentionned in the README:
sudo apt-get install curl -y bash < <(curl -s -k -B https://raw.github.com/cloudfoundry/vcap/master/setup/install)
When it’s finished (it lasted more than 1.5 hour on my old desktop computer!), log out and vagrant ssh again (so that your groups / env get
reloaded).
Before starting cloud foundry, I strongly encourage you to adapt the memory and CPU of your VM if you didn’t before (min 1G RAM and 4 cores for my setup).
Then I logged in again to the VM and prepared to start the whole thing:
rvm rvmrc trust ~/cloudfoundry/vcap cd ~/cloudfoundry/vcap bin/vcap start #=>BOOM :/
But I had problems at this point. I think I hit that bug. You should run this commands before starting everything, it won’t hurt if you’re not in my case, because our instance is just a test instance so we don’t need to change default configuration choices:
sed -i 's#.*db:migrate.*#Dir.chdir("\#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/../cloud_controller") { `bundle exec rake db:migrate` }#' bin/vcap
Then you can finally start everything:
cd ~/cloudfoundry/vcap bin/vcap start
You should see:
router : RUNNING cloud_controller : RUNNING dea : RUNNING health_manager : RUNNING stager : RUNNING redis_gateway : RUNNING redis_node : RUNNING mysql_gateway : RUNNING mysql_node : RUNNING mongodb_gateway : RUNNING mongodb_node : RUNNING neo4j_gateway : RUNNING neo4j_node : RUNNING
Some components may appear as “STOPPED” if your VM is too slow (cloud_controller in my case). So maybe it’s a good idea to issue
a bin/vcap status afterwards to see if everything has booted properly. If not, you can restart a specific service like that: bin/vcap
start cloud_controller. It’s probably a good idea to watch the log ‘live’ too: bin/vcap tail to detect any problem. Be careful, it’s
really verbose.
One other step, you need to make a local SSL tunnel so that commands sent to api.vcap.me (a conventional domain in
cloud foundry ecosystem, which resolves to 127.0.0.1) are forwarded to the VM. If you find a solution to forward your local 80 port to the VM one, go ahead.
But communicating to your vagrant VM directly didn’t seem to be that easy for me, so I uncommented the config.vm.forward_port (forward local
8080 to VM’s 80) in the Vagrantfile, restarted the VM (vagrant halt; vagrant up), and started CF services as described above.
When everything’s ok, log out and, from the host:
gem install vmc vmc target api.vcap.me:8080 vmc info
You should see something like:
VMware's Cloud Application Platform For support visit http://support.cloudfoundry.com Target: http://api.vcap.me:8080 (v0.999) Client: v0.3.14
Now we can (finally!) play with your new toy. First register and login:
vmc register --email foo@bar.com --passwd password vmc login --email foo@bar.com --passwd password
And build our first app (adapted from the README):
mkdir env && cd env
echo -e "require 'rubygems'\nrequire 'sinatra'\nget('/'){ host = ENV['VMC_APP_HOST']; port = ENV['VMC_APP_PORT']; %(<h1>XXXXX Hello from the Cloud! via: #{host}:#{port}</h1>) }" > env.rb
Then deploy it, as easy as:
vmc push env --instances 4 --mem 64M --url env.vcap.me -n
In case it doesn’t work, and you want to consult logs manually, apps are stored in /var/vcap.local/dea/apps/ in the VM. Note that you can see
an Error on startup even if the application starts correctly, don’t know why.
Anyway, the result in http://env.vcap.me:8080/ should be OK, you’ll see your four instances answer alternatively like a charm.
Run vmc help if you want to scale the app because of an excessive load!
Conclusion: the product seems great, but it’s not really well-documented and it can be hard to find informations or people with the same problems. Community seems to be super-reactive tho. In the past I tried to play with more complex app (rails+mysql) and had other problems, so I let you test and see if you’re happy with CloudFoundry.