dw-dev-vagrant

hi. This brings up a disposable Dreamwidth dev instance, with all required services configured and running (the workers are up, blobstore is configured so you can upload icons, etc.).

Getting it running

Prerequisites

• Install VirtualBox.
• Install Vagrant.
• Fork dreamwidth/dw-free to your own account.

Run the thing

• Clone this repo.
• Copy config-example.yaml to config.yaml and edit as needed.
• Make sure you're not running on battery and are on an unmetered internet connection.
• vagrant up
  • It'll ask you which host network interface to bridge to. Probably choose your main wifi interface, which on a modern laptop is usually listed as en0.
  • Be patient. It might take maybe an hour, I haven't timed it. I do know that there are two CPAN modules in particular that take forever to build (LWP::UserAgent::Paranoid and Paws::S3?) and give no feedback, but they do eventually install correctly.

Once it's up

• Commit whatever DNS Crimes you gotta to make sure your normal computer can reach the VM at dev-width.test and all subdomains thereof. (It'll print a message with its IP addresses after it's all the way up; use the bridged one on your local network, not the NAT-ted one.)
• Browse to http://dev-width.test and log in as "system" (using the password in config.yaml).
• Log into the VM with vagrant ssh and switch to the DW user with sudo -iu dw. Nothing should require a password, and dw can sudo to restart apache or whatever (sudo apache2ctl graceful).
• Have fun!
  • DW code is at ~/dw, and you should be able to fetch from and push to your fork. The upstream is called "upstream" instead of "origin", because IMO you should go out of your way to never get confused about which fork is yours. You can git remote add origin <url> if you absolutely must.
  • I've got ag installed so you can search for stuff. ag --help for info.
  • Root disk looks like it's set to 20gb (dynamically allocated), which should hopefully last u long enough to hack on a few things.

When you're done

vagrant halt when you want to stop the VM and set it aside for a while, vagrant destroy when you want to delete the VM and start fresh some other time.

Dealing with Dreamwidth accounts

Empowering the system user

The system user starts with no permissions except the ability to give anyone any permission. So to do basically anything, you first have to give yourself the necessary permissions. Start with the payments permission, so you can create invite codes for additional scratch users.

• http://www.dev-width.test/admin/priv/

Making invite codes

Use the admin console.

• http://www.dev-width.test/admin/console

make_invites <username> <count> <reason>

Email

DW accounts need to verify email addresses to do anything fun (like post comments), but your real email provider is DEFINITELY not accepting anything from this Suspicious Object.

So we have a local mailbox you can use. Just enter dw@dev-width.post as the email for all your test accounts. To check that mailbox, log into the VM as the dw user (see above) and run mutt.

DNS

You have to be able to reach your dev instance with a web browser, but you can't just add it to /etc/hosts because DW uses approximately infinity subdomains. Your main options seem to be:

Mac/Linux: dnsmasq.

I got this working. Seems fine.

• Relevant bit on the DW wiki
• A good post with mac instructions
• brew install it.
• config file at /usr/local/etc/dnsmasq.conf
  • uncomment domain-needed and bogus-priv
  • set listen-address to the host mac's IP address on the bridged network, plus the loopback address. comma separated.
  • set address=/dev-width.test/<BOX'S BRIDGED IP>
    • UGH, which will be different on every run, I wonder if https://github.com/mattes/vagrant-dnsmasq is plausible for handling this.
• start it with sudo brew services start dnsmasq (it'll fail to get a port without the sudo.)
  • it should ask for firewall permissions at this point.
• sudo mkdir /etc/resolver if it doesn't exist.
• create file /etc/resolver/test, with contents nameserver 127.0.0.1. Now the host mac will hit dnsmasq for .test domains.

Windows: Acrylic?

I don't know anything about this, but StackOverflow consensus seems bullish on it.

Edit: I got this working on one of those free IE8 VMs, and it works fine. I was in a hurry and forgot to write down what I did, but the docs and default config file are fairly readable.

iOS: Socks proxy through your Mac

TBH at this point you probably need to actually set up DNS on your local network, but if you just want to test a one-off, I got this working fine without having to install any extra stuff anywhere.

This brief tutorial had everything I needed.

When you're done, remember to set your phone's proxy settings back to "off" and kill the SSH forwarding process on your Mac. (It stays foregrounded in your terminal, so at least you're not likely to forget it and leave it running.)

Improving this dev setup

good gracious, please do.

these are the instructions I'm automating. They're missing some bits (uncommenting the blob store stuff is basically mandatory, and it doesn't tell you about gearman).

when iterating more quickly, the command you need for refreshing is vagrant provision --provision-with puppet

All the Puppet modules are just vendored because I'm lazy and I assume you are too. dw_dev is the only unique one.

IDK if bridged mode networking is actually good to be using here (spoiler, probably not), but I never did figure out how to master virtualbox's multi-adapter whoopie-cushion tornado. ugh. Maybe later.

License(s)

• Like I said, I vendored a lot of Puppet modules, so I guess I'm accidentally a distro now. They all ride under the terms of their original licenses, which are vendored right along with em. Mostly Apache 2, small GPL contingent, one Perl Artistic.
• The stuff I wrote is all in the dw_dev module, which I'm making available under the Apache 2 licence.