Development Environment

In order to make contributing easy, all projects should have an automated way to create a development environment. This might be as simple as a Python virtual environment, or it could be a virtual machine or container. This document provides guidelines for setting up development environments.

Ansible

Ansible is used throughout Fedora Infrastructure to automate tasks. If the project requires anything more than a Python virtual environment to be set up, you should use Ansible to automate the setup.

Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool to provision virtual machines. It allows you to define a base image (called a "box"), virtual machine resources, network configuration, directories to share between the host and guest machine, and much more. It can be configured to use libvirt to provision the virtual machines.

You can install Vagrant on a Fedora host with:

$ sudo dnf install libvirt vagrant vagrant-libvirt vagrant-sshfs

You can combine your Ansible playbook with Vagrant very easily. Simply point Vagrant to your Ansible playbook and it will run it. Users who would prefer to provision their virtual machines in some other way are free to do so and only need to run the Ansible playbook on their host.

How a project lays out its development-related content is up to the individual project, but a good approach is to create a devel directory. Within that directory you can create an ansible directory and use the layout suggested in the Ansible roles documentation.

Below is a Vagrantfile that provisions a Fedora 34 virtual machine, updates it, mounts the current folder as /home/vagrant/devel, and runs an Ansible playbook from devel/ansible on it. You can place it in the root of your repository as Vagrantfile.example and instruct users to copy it to Vagrantfile and customize as they wish.

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
 config.vm.box = "fedora/34-cloud-base"

 # Forward traffic on the host to the development server on the guest
 # RabbitMQ
 config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 15672, host: 15672

 # Vagrant can share the source directory using rsync, NFS, or SSHFS (with the vagrant-sshfs
 # plugin). By default it rsyncs the current working directory to /vagrant.
 #
 # If you would prefer to use NFS to share the directory uncomment this and configure NFS
 # config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "nfs", nfs_version: 4, nfs_udp: false
 config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/home/vagrant/devel", type: "sshfs"

 # To cache update packages (which is helpful if frequently doing `vagrant destroy && vagrant up`)
 # you can create a local directory and share it to the guest's DNF cache. The directory needs to
 # exist, so create it before you uncomment the line below.
 #
 # config.vm.synced_folder ".dnf-cache", "/var/cache/dnf", type: "sshfs", sshfs_opts_append: "-o nonempty"

 # Comment this line if you would like to disable the automatic update during provisioning
 config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "sudo dnf upgrade -y"

 # bootstrap and run with ansible
 config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
     ansible.playbook = "devel/ansible/vagrant-playbook.yml"
     ansible.raw_arguments = ["-e", "ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3"]
 end


 # Create the "hotness" box
 config.vm.define "hotness" do |hotness|
    hotness.vm.host_name = "hotness-dev.example.com"

    hotness.vm.provider :libvirt do |domain|
        # Season to taste
        domain.cpus = 4
        domain.graphics_type = "spice"
        domain.memory = 2048
        domain.video_type = "qxl"

        # Uncomment the following line if you would like to enable libvirt's unsafe cache
        # mode. It is called unsafe for a reason, as it causes the virtual host to ignore all
        # fsync() calls from the guest. Only do this if you are comfortable with the possibility of
        # your development guest becoming corrupted (in which case you should only need to do a
        # vagrant destroy and vagrant up to get a new one).
        #
        # domain.volume_cache = "unsafe"
    end
 end
end

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