Setting up a Development Environment Using Vagrant

The standard development environment is a single computer that fills the role of database server, load generation server, and framework server. While this is not useful for serious benchmarking, it does allow painless development and testing. Using a virtual machine as a development environment prevents having to install hundreds of framework dependencies directly onto your computer.

We provide a Vagrant script to automatically setup a virtual machine as a development server. Currently, you can use either VirtualBox or LibVirt to run this development environment. This page details how to use VirtualBox.

Feel free to submit a PR to help us support more providers, such as Rackspace or VMware.

Prerequisites

• A recent version of Vagrant, like 1.6.3 (NOTE: apt-get is too old, download the newest deb directly). See here for downloads

• A CPU that can virtualize a 64-bit virtual OS, because TFB downloads a number of static binaries that require 64-bit. See the FAQs section below for more on this. If you cannot meet this requirement, consider using the Amazon provider (about $1/day)

• VirtualBox to run the virtual machines

Launching VirtualBox Development Environment

In short, you need to clone the project and then run vagrant up followed by vagrant ssh. Your cloned working directory will be exposed inside the virtual machine at ~/FrameworkBenchmarks, so you can continue to edit files using your favorite IDE and the changes will show up inside the virtual machine.

Details:

# Go into the right directory
$ cd FrameworkBenchmarks/deployment/vagrant
# Setup the VM with all initial software (takes 15-20 minutes)
$ vagrant up
# SSH into the machine (you get a nice welcome message)
$ vagrant ssh
Welcome to the FrameworkBenchmarks project!
   
To get started, perhaps try this:
   $ cd FrameworkBenchmarks
   $ toolset/run-tests.py --install server --test go
   $ cat results/latest/logs/go/out.txt

You can get lots of help:
   $ toolset/run-tests.py --help

This Vagrant environment is already setup and ready to go, so you
can ignore any flags about users, hosts, or identity files

Using VirtualBox Development Environment

After using vagrant ssh, you will find the project at ~/FrameworkBenchmarks. You can use tfb without specifying any information about hosts, usernames, or private key files, as so:

$ cd ~/FrameworkBenchmarks
$ tfb --mode verify --test gemini

FAQs

I'm using a 32-bit computer, can I run your Virtual Machine?:

If 1) your CPU provides the vmx or smv features, and 2) they are enabled in your BIOS and 3) they are enabled in Virtualbox, then yes. The easiest way to check this all is to attempt to launch the VM without hiding the window:

$ TFB_SHOW_VM=true vagrant up

If you see a boot sequence and a login, you're good to go. If you only see a black screen, examine if you meet all three requirements. If you do not, then you can either 1) run on Amazon or 2) try your luck with a 32-bit virtual machine. A number of the downloaded framework binaries are 64-bit only, so those will be unable to run.

To force FrameworkBenchmarks to use a 32-bit VM, do this:

$ TFB_ARCH=32 vagrant up

See here for some helpful information.