No doubt that the consistent, properly configured and convenient development environment is a key element of productive work. Unfortunately every developer knows how tricky and painful can be the process of installing and configuring full Drupal development stack.

The real world example

Just imagine that you are going to build e-commerce site with modern Drupal modules like Commerce, Search API and Omega 4 theme. Here the list of software to be installed and configured:

• Apache2, PHP, MySQL stack.
• Java to install Apache Solr for Search API
• Ruby to install Omega 4 dependencies
• Drush with appropriate aliases
• Xdebug, Webgrind
• Tools to test emails like Mailcatcher
• Tools to administer database (PhpMyAdmin, adminer)

How much time will developer spend to install all that stuff? And have confidence that it’s installed with the best settings for optimal performance? Don’t forget to multiply calculated time to number of your team members, especially for those without System Admin skills.

Also keep in mind that developers have different operating systems. Can you guarantee that code developed on Windows, for example will work properly on production server with Linux?

And the last thing. Imagine you have parallel project which requires other version of PHP or proxy server in front of Apache.

Unfortunately these problems are not imaginary. Every day all over the world developers faces that problems in real life.

The real world solution

Fortunately there are tools that can solve aforementioned problem. We will present about proper usage of that tools and demonstrate a quick and effective solution.

More than one year we are using Vagrant Drupal Development (VDD), a Drupal project consisting of Vagrant, Chef and Virtualbox to work on Drupal projects. Join both co-maintainers as we share our real work experience.

Attendees will

• Understand why local development makes sense.
• Understand how Vagrant and Virtualbox work.
• Understand how Chef works within Vagrant Drupal Development (VDD) deployment.
• Know what features are included in the VDD stack.
• Be able to install VDD for local development.
• Know basic commands for VDD usage and how to access sites immediately “out of the box”.
• Know how to extend VDD with both custom Chef cookbooks and Vagrant plug-ins.
• Know how to share environment configs with team members.
• See how to use Chef and write custom cookbooks.

The session will be interesting to Drupal developers working in groups, single developers and team leads.