Vagrant is software used to more easily manage VirtualBox, while VirtualBox will run the actual virtual machine. This repository provides a vagrantfile that defines a Vagrant box to help with code development. The Vagrant box is a virtual machine that acts as a development and test server. It provides a LAMP stack with Ubuntu 22.04, Apache2, MySQL, and PHP 8.1.

The Vagrant box was originally developed and tested with Vagrant 2.2.3, VirtualBox 5.2.26, and macOS 10.12.6. It should work with Vagrant 2.2.0 or later, VirtualBox 5.2.x or later, and any operating systems compatible with Vagrant and Virtualbox. This development environment does not work on (ARM) M1 based Macintosh because Virtualbox only works with x86/x64.

Vagrant (2.4.2+) and Virtualbox (7.1+) now support Apple Silicon (arm64) Macintosh. This has been tested with a Mac Mini M4 Pro with macOS Sequoia 15.5, Vagrant 2.4.6, and Virtualbox v7.1.8, and found that the Vagrant box will build and run. However, you must provide arm64 precompiled binaries for lmutil and monitorlm. Alternatively, you can try to manually install Box64 to provide x64 to arm64 translation. We are not affiliated with Box64, and therefore cannot provide any technical assistance for Box64.

Please do not try to use the vagrant box as a production system. The vagrant box is provided as a development aid. It is meant to be only accessible to its host computer, and it is not designed with the proper security needed for a production system.

• Guest, Box, VM: The virtual machine development and test server.
• Host: refers to your computer that is running the virtual machine.

Download and install for your operating system:

• Vagrant By HashiCorp: https://www.vagrantup.com/
• VirtualBox By Oracle: https://www.virtualbox.org/

1. Install Vagrant and VirtualBox.
   • Make sure to install the vbguest plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
   • You do not need the Virtualbox Extension Pack to run this Vagrant box.
2. Provide license manager binaries for FlexLM (lmutil) and Mathematica (monitorlm).
   • Copy the license manager binaries to vagrant_provision/lmtools within the cloned repository.
   • Make sure the binaries are compiled for Linux.
   • License manager binaries shall not be tracked in this repository. Please do not remove their entries in .gitignore.
3. Clone this repository to your host, either with git command line or the Github Application.
4. Go to the root folder of the cloned repository.
5. On the command line: vagrant up
   • There will be a long series of build messages printed to the console.
   • Build messages will be logged in the repository at logs/provision.log (not tracked by git).
   • Depending on the speed of your Internet connection and the speed of your host computer, it can take 30 minutes or more to build the VM.
   • Once the VM is built, it doesn't take nearly as long to start up the VM another time.

You may develop code for this repository on your host. Make sure the VM is running to test the server in your web browser.

• Clone the repository, and develop and commit code on your host.
• Code is in HTML, CSS, and PHP.
• You do not need to install PHP on your host.
• To test any code changes, the Vagrant VM needs to be updated with this command:
  vagrant up --provision-with update
  • Alternatively, you may update your code with sudo perl ~/update via ssh. This is usually faster. ~/ refers to /home/vagrant/.
• You can view the VM server webpage at http://localhost:50080
• A MySQL database viewer can connect to the VM server at localhost, port 53306.
  • MySQL Workbench can connect to the VM server with user and password as vagrant. Database Schema is also vagrant.
• Should Apache generate a 500 error, the error will be logged to /opt/debug/phplw_errors.log within VM.
  • You can use vagrant up --provision-with show-log to view the tail of the log.
  • You can use vagrant ssh to get a command line shell to the VM.
  • Some code editors have (either built-in or as a module/plugin) SFTP access to files. You can gain access to the VM's file system (and log files) this way using the same login as ssh — port: 2222, user: vagrant, password: vagrant.

• You can use secure copy ('scp') to upload a file to the VM without it being tracked by git:
  scp -P 2222 my_file vagrant@localhost:
  • Password is vagrant.
• The VM can use the host's Internet connection.
  • Virtualbox typically (but not guaranteed) assigns the VM an IP of 10.0.2.15. This is not visible from the host due to Virtualbox's NAT firewall. Instead, certain ports are forwarded to the host at localhost. Forwarded ports are listed, below.
  • Virtualbox's NAT firewall is meant to block connections to the VM from the Internet.
  • Your host can be seen from within the VM at 10.0.2.2.
• You can manually run license_cache.php and license_util.php via ssh with sudo php ~/license_cache and sudo php ~/license_util respectively. ~/ refers to /home/vagrant/.

• Many problems can be solved by issuing a "full-update". vagrant up --provision-with full-update
• If a "full update" doesn't fix the problem, you can rebuild the VM. Note that this will destroy any personal modifications you may have made (e.g. custom config file).
  1. Destroy the VM. vagrant destroy
  2. Update the locally cached Ubuntu image. This may reduce time needed to provision a new VM. vagrant box update
  3. Build a new VM. vagrant up
• The vagrant box gets occasional patches in this github repository, which can make your current VM obsolete. Sometimes, a "full-update" will bring your VM current, but that is not a guarantee. When a "full-update" doesn't work, please rebuild the VM as described above.
• If you are getting a "connection was reset" error in your web browser, Apache may not be running.
  1. Enter the Vagrant box via ssh. vagrant ssh
  2. Start Apache. sudo apachectl start or sudo apachectl restart
• Should vagrant ssh fail to authenticate, you can alternatively try ssh -p 2222 vagrant@localhost. Password is vagrant.
• If the code files are not available in the VM at ~/github_phplw, try this command in the host: vagrant vbguest --do install.

Never use these values in a production system.