Setting up Learning Locker with Vagrant

A couple of years ago I wanted to install Learning Locker on OSX, I blogged about it to help me remember what to it and I found it pretty useful to return to when I got stuck. I need to install Learning Locker again, but looking through my old post reminded me that it is a little bit of a pain, mostly because it relies on various PHP extensions which are extra fiddly when you are using MAMP/XXAMP/etc across various platforms.

I decided to run a light weight virtual machine that I could move from machine to machine, after having a look around at what is possible I decided to do it on Vagrant, which is virtualization software type thing that I’ve never played with. If you just want to throw an instance up then Jim Baker has already done it here which has a configured box for you to download, he seems to have made from a AWS image. Having never used vagrant before I wanted to do it myself, but also I wanted a barebones Ubuntu box that I had put together myself (with apt-get..).

I think it is relatively straight forward and should be similar on Windows, but once again I will write down the steps incase it helps this time next year… infact I should make sure I put the image somewhere safe..

1. Install Vagrant, borrow a barebones Ubuntu VM

Download and install Vagrant from their site, it is a stright forward . Once installed you can create a virtual machine from the command line. I created a new directory under ~/Documents to store the virtual machine. I opened Terminal, created a new directory, created a Ubuntu instance and brought the machine up like so:

cd ~/Documents
mkdir vagrant
cd vagrant
mkdir vanillubuntu
cd vanillaubuntu
vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64; vagrant up --provider virtualbox
vagrant up

2. Set box up with LAMP + Mongo

You can now SSH on to your machine using:

vagrant ssh

On the box I set up LAMP, MongoDB and MongoDB, Curl mmycrpt PHP extensions, using apt this is very easy:

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10
echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-org
sudo apt-get install php-pear php5-dev
sudo apt-get install libsasl2-dev
sudo pecl install mongo
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
apt-get install php5-mcrypt
php –ini (to find the ini file)
sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini (add extension=mongo.so & extension=mcrypt.so)
sudo service apache2 restart

3. Configure port forwarding:

Back on your Mac use Finder to navigate to the directory where you ran the ‘vagrant init’ command, in there should be a file, open the file and uncomment this line so that you can access Learning Locker (when it’s up_ on Port 8080

config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080

Reload the machine with:

vagrant reload

Then you can check http://127.0.0.1:8080/ in a browser, you should see the Apache welcome page.

4. Install Learning Locker

Now I want to install learning locker and config on the box, clean the box up and save it .  I installed Learning Locker mostly, the way it says on the site changing a few bits to suit my enviroment

sudo apt-get install git
sd /var/www
sudo git clone https://github.com/LearningLocker/learninglocker.git learninglocker
cd learninglocker
sudo suphp -r "readfile('https://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php
exit
php composer.phar update
php composer.phar install --no-interaction --no-dev

5. Create MangoDB user

You need to create a user and password in Mongo that will work with a collection:

Mongo
>Use learninglocker
>db.addUser( { user: "pickausername", pwd: "pickapassword", roles: [ "readWrite" ] } )
>exit

Then create a database file in Learning Locker that users these credentals:

Sudo nano app/config/local/database.php

<?php
return [
    'connections' => [
        'mongodb' => [
            'driver'   => 'mongodb',
            'host'     => 'localhost',
            'port'     => 27017,
            'username' => 'YOUR_DATABASE_USERNAME',
            'password' => 'YOUR_DATABASE_PASSWORD',
            'database' => 'YOUR_DATABASE_NAME'
        ],
    ]
];

6. Modrewrite and the such

In theory it should work now, for some reason mod_rewrite wasn’t enabled by default; I always thought that it was, but incase not here all the steps:

sudo a2enmod rewrite negotiation php5
sudo service apache2 restart

and add Allowoverride All in directory tags to your apache config in sites-avalible.

7. GO

So I exited the instance using ‘exi’t and saved the box. To do this I first had to find out the ID of the box, which you can find back in terminal with:

vboxmanage list vms

and then you can save it with

vagrant package --base <id>  --output ~/Documents/vagrantboxes/learninglocker.box

Now whenever I boot up that box I head to:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/learninglocker/public/

to register and start.

8. Save the box

Then I created a new vagrant from this box, first I add the box to the list with:

vagrant box add learninglocker.box --name learninglocker

And then create it in a directory with:

vagrant init learninglocker
vagrant up then starts learning locker

Note: I’ve been having problems with the insecure keypair since doing this. Aparently so have lots of other Ubuntu users. Still, I can ssh in with the default username/password recommended by vagrant.