Install Koha via Chef and Vagrant

Warning: This article is very old. Information here might not apply to current state Koha.

Deploying Koha from git with Chef and Vagrant

• See http://halcyoncorsair.tumblr.com/post/31841813338/deploying-koha-from-git-with-chef for the original post.

I use Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) a lot to manage my VirtualBox virtual machines, so my first step was to get Koha up and running via Vagrant on an Ubuntu Precise LTS VM.  Koha has eleventy-billion perl dependencies, and having to install them every time I tore down and rebuilt the VM was really killing my buzz, so I took the vanilla precise64 base box from http://www.vagrantbox.es, installed all the perl dependencies along with a couple other useful tools, repackaged it, and put it in my Dropbox public folder: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5595111/precise64-kohadeps.box.

Koha cookbook (https://github.com/halcyonCorsair/chef-koha) dependencies:

• apache2
• perl
• mysql

These cookbooks can all be found on the Opscode community site (http://community.opscode.com/) and on github (https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks).  I created a Berksfile (https://gist.github.com/3725346) the Berkshelf (http://berkshelf.com/) tool to fetch the cookbook dependencies for me. Then a Vagrantfile (https://gist.github.com/3725466) for my soon to be chef-controlled instance of koha. Then simply:

vagrant up

Once vagrant has booted up the VM and chef has finished provisioning the system, with any luck, a koha development copy will have been installed on the vm at /home/vagrant/koha, you will be able to access the opac via http://localhost:8000, and the web installer will be ready to go on http://localhost:8080.