Tom Romano  •  Comment

Vagrant Tools and Tips

You probably have noticed I’ve be talking a bit about vagrant lately. I’ve been using it a lot. Here is another few links I’ve found interesting.

Vagrant tips from Anton has some general tips and trips for using vagrant

Rove.io allows you to create vagrant configs quickly and easily.

Test Kitchen allows you to test chef setups locally

Foodcritic is another chef lint checker

Tom Romano  •  Comment

Removing a git submodule

Git submodules are super handy and awesome. But quickly become a pain if you dont have them setup right. This link by David Walsh covers how to remove a git submodule on his site, but I’ll put it here to look it up quickly.

Delete the relevant section from the .gitmodules file. The section would look similar to:

    [submodule "vendor"]
    path = vendor
    url = git://github.com/some-user/some-repo.git

Stage the .gitmodules changes via command line using: 

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git add .gitmodules

Delete the relevant section from .git/config, which will look like:

    [submodule "vendor"]
    url = git://github.com/some-user/some-repo.git

Run 

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git rm --cached path/to/submodule
. Don’t include a trailing slash – that will lead to an error.

Run 

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rm -rf .git/modules/submodule_name

Commit the changes

Delete the now untracked submodule files 

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rm -rf path/to/submodule

Tom Romano  •  Comment

Fixing vagrant up hostonlyif error

If you’re having wierd hostonlyif errors when trying to do 

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vagrant up
then checkout this pro-tip on coderwall. It’ll kickstart the required VirtualBox processes again and get you going again. Basically you just restart VirtualBox by running 
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sudo /Library/StartupItems/VirtualBox/VirtualBox restart
on OSX to fix it up

Tom Romano  •  Comment

At my workplace, we had a dedicated Selenium Server which sits in the AWS cloud.

We would use it to be able to run our test suites against a real web browser.

By having a selenium server in the cloud we could then use Madcow or any other selenium/webdriver supported language for our web application testing requirements.

But when AWS did updates ubuntu packages or anything changed, the system was started/stopped everything would come crumbling down again.

I had heard, read and played a little with Vagrant which is basically a Developer Environment Virtual Machine management system but not used it yet.

Then I stumbled upon this awesome article about Running Headles Selenium With Chrome by Chris Le which basically achieves what I was thinking about doing, but just needed a little tweaking.

First I went off and installed latest version of vagrant and virtualbox.

Then I installed the vagrant precise64 bit box by running… 

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vagrant box add precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box

Then I installed the vagrant aws provider plugin by running… 

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vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws

Next I created my Vagrantfile… again, slightly tweaked from Chris’ to suit our requirements (e.g. ebs backed instance)

# encoding: utf-8
# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|

  config.vm.box = "precise64"
  config.vm.box_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box"    
  config.ssh.forward_agent = true

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
    v.gui = false      # adds a gui to virtuaBox locally
  end

  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
    override.vm.box = "dummy"               # overrides virtuabox config to use empty box as will load ami below...
    override.vm.box_url = "https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box"
    aws.access_key_id = '135124124124'      # Replace this with yours   
    aws.secret_access_key = 'XYZ'           # Replace this with yours
    aws.keypair_name = 'amazon-webdriver'   # the name of the keypair instance should use
    #aws.ami = 'ami-7747d01e'               # ubuntu 12.04 64bit precise instance backed
    aws.ami = 'ami-0145d268'                # ubuntu 12.04 64bit precise ebs backed
    aws.instance_type = 't1.micro'          # forced to t1.micro for us
    override.ssh.username = 'ubuntu'        # username override from default of vagrant
    override.ssh.private_key_path = './../../keys/amazon-key.pem' # path to my amazon pem file
    aws.security_groups = ['webdriver']     # name of the security group i have preconfigured in AWS with port 22 and 4444 open
    # aws.elastic_ip = 'someIPshouldGoHere' # was hoping to put an elastic IP in here but it never seemed to work        
    
    # below are the tags to help me easily identify these guys in the console
    aws.tags = {
      'Name' => 'vagrant-webdriver',
      'webdriver' => 'true'
    }
  end

  # tells vagrant to run the setup.sh when the shell is available
  config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "setup.sh"
  # tells vagrant to make the VM port 4444 accessible on host port 4444 (only works for VirtuaBox provider)
  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest:4444, host:4444

end

Basically we had a few more requirements, we wanted the remote server to be able to run firefox, phantomjs and chrome so to be able to do that I had to add a few more items to the setup.sh script.

It’s included below:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

if [ -e /.installed ]; then
  echo 'Already installed.'

else
  echo ''
  echo 'INSTALLING'
  echo '----------'

  # Add Google public key to apt
  wget -q -O - "https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub" | sudo apt-key add -

  # Add Google to the apt-get source list
  echo 'deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list

  # Update app-get
  apt-get update

  # Install Java, Chrome, Xvfb, and unzip
  apt-get -y install openjdk-7-jre google-chrome-stable xvfb unzip firefox
  # apt-get -y install openjdk-7-jre google-chrome-stable xvfb unzip firefox phantomjs

  # Download and copy the ChromeDriver to /usr/local/bin
  cd /tmp
  wget "https://chromedriver.googlecode.com/files/chromedriver_linux64_2.2.zip"
  wget "https://selenium.googlecode.com/files/selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar"
  wget "http://phantomjs.googlecode.com/files/phantomjs-1.9.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2"
  unzip chromedriver_linux64_2.2.zip
  mv chromedriver /usr/local/bin
  tar xjf phantomjs-1.9.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
  mv selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar /usr/local/bin
  sudo chmod +x /tmp/phantomjs-1.9.1-linux-x86_64/bin/phantomjs
  sudo ln -s /tmp/phantomjs-1.9.1-linux-x86_64/bin/phantomjs /usr/local/bin/phantomjs

  # So that running `vagrant provision` doesn't redownload everything
  touch /.installed
fi

# Start Xvfb, Chrome, and Selenium in the background
export DISPLAY=:10
cd /vagrant

echo "Starting Xvfb ..."
Xvfb :10 -screen 0 1366x768x24 -ac &

echo "Starting Google Chrome ..."
google-chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222 &

echo "Starting Selenium ..."
cd /usr/local/bin
nohup java -jar ./selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar &

Then once I was done I could simply fire up a local ubuntu VM with all the stuff I need to run selenium tests against by exacuting 

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vagrant up
at the command line.

If I wanted my solution in the AWS cloud however, it was a simple matter of running 

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vagrant up --provider=aws

Once it does it’s thing I can ssh on to the VM by running 

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vagrant ssh
which I needed to do to get the AWS public DNS IP. It will even rsync the current folder to the VM’s /vagrant directory, so I can run all my tests right here on the VM if I wanted to.

To run my webdriver (or remote Madcow in my case) tests from my host I can also simply point them to the remote server url endpoint of 

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http://localhost:4444/wd/hub
and then wait for my test results.

Bam webdriver selenium test server setup and ready to go in minutes.

Note: I also tried to configure an elastic IP setup for AWS provider run but was unsuccesful. I will update here when/if I get that working.

Tom Romano  •  Comment

Changing Java JDK versions quickly and easily

I recently shared this pro-tip on coderwall. It’s a favourite of mine. It basically allows you to quickly and easily switch between your JDK’s on MacOSX. Maybe you will find it useful also.