Using Salt Stack and Vagrant for Drupal Development

Ben Hosmer — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:21:52 +0000

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that.

Or, what if, like Jake Epping in Stephen King's 11/22/63, you could make changes and script the past without fear, play around with some new Drupal modules, and quickly reset everything just by leaving and then walking back down the stairs of the pantry again?

Would you like to automate the creation and installation of a pristine Drupal environment, instead of manually installing Apache, PHP and all of the needed libraries?

Recently, I read a post from Treehouse Agency titled, "End 'Works on My Machine' Surprises with Vagrant", which is about using Vagrant and Puppet for Drupal development. You may have seen it as well on Drupal Planet and wondered about the benefits described there.

This is a great technique that outlines using various tools to build a consistent development environment quickly that is repeatable and shareable with everyone on your team.

Linux Journal also recently featured an article that introduced Vagrant. After you're finished here, I urge you to go read that one too, because it offers more general information about Vagrant itself.

Salt Stack is a tool similar to Puppet, but it's powered by Python, instead of Ruby. If you are interested in standalone Salt installation and use, check out my November 2012 LJ article on that topic, where I introduce Salt Stack and show how to install it to control one or thousands of other machines. I won't go in depth into Salt's installation here, because Salty-Vagrant takes care of all of that for you.

I've been using Salt, Vagrant and a Vagrant gem called Salty-Vagrant for Drupal development quite a bit lately. I've found that having a standard configuration that mirrors my development, testing, staging and production environments has streamlined my workflow and helped prevent a lot of the unknowns between different stages of the Drupal development life cycle. I've been able to minimize a lot of the errors and headaches that come with integrating multiple software stacks and speed up my workflow too.

I also enjoy being able to try new things quickly and easily without spending hours reconfiguring and re-installing the entire software stack needed for Drupal development.

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