In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell dives into the world of vagrant/puppet/chef and looks at using the tools to automatically create VMs that you can use for PHP development (or testing).

I've been hearing great things about puppet, chef, vagrant, and friends for a while now, but since I work on my own I tend to either develop straight onto my ubuntu machine or grab an appropriate existing VM and use that. So I read about this brave new world of virtualisation but (as with most tools) they can be hard to introduce on your own, and I didn't. [...] Then I went to WhiskyWeb, which had a hackathon [...] with the shiny new technology all packaged for me, I decided it was time to take a look!

She shows you how to get the VM started up using vagrant, pausing the instance and removing it all together (destroy). She also includes the command to directly access the VM via ssh and links to the joind.in project with its sample puppet configuration and Vagrant file.

In the latest post to his blog Rob Allen looks at using Vagrant with Zend Framework applications to use for testing your code against multiple ZF versions.

Vagrant is a fantastic tool that enables you to manage and run virtual machines from the command line, including automatic provisioning of them using puppet or chef. The really cool thing about it however from my point of view is that vagrant automatically sets up the VM with a folder called /vagrant that holds the code on your local hard drive from where you started the VM. This means that you can continue to edit your code in your local editor/IDE and test it within the VM easily

Inspired by similar work on the joind.in project, he's created the instructions to make a Vagrantfile that, using VirtualBox and this puppet configuration, sets up and configures a VM you can ssh into and execute your tests.

In a new post to his blog Chris Hartjes shows you how to get PHP 5.4 installed on a CentOS machine (virtual machine) with the help of Vagrant.

I like the idea of using Vagrant to create virtual machines for my development work. Doing things this way I think keeps the host machine cleaner and allows you the ability to distribute those VM's to other people as well. My old boss Ben Ramsey did a very informative post on getting PHP 5.4 configured on CentOS so I decided to one-up him by taking his instructions and creating a Puppet manifest so you could do this using Vagrant or on any server that you can provision using Puppet.

He example is based off of the publiclly available Vagrant setup and provides the contents of the Vagrantfile that he uses to set up the machine. From there, Puppet takes over and uses his configuration (also included) to set up things like the Apache server, some configurations for it, a list of PHP extensions and, of course, PHP itself.

On DZone.com there's WordPress instance on an Amazon EC2 instance with the help of Puppet and Joyent appliance, migrating to Linode, and finally, to Amazon with a Bitnami stack, we noticed the common pain of manually configuring each of these environments. Bitnami caused us an even bigger headache by being very difficult to update (apt-get doesn't update the bitnami wrapped AMP stack). We decided to get full control of our box by setting up a stock Debian LAMP stack on AWS using Puppet and git to manage our sites. Here's a gentle introduction on how we did it.

He guides you through the entire process:

• Setting up a micro instance on EC2
• Signing up for unfuddle (for git)
• Installing Puppet (standalone)
• Setting up your git repository to point to unfuddle
• The needed Puppet configuration files to get the WordPress instance deployed

Complete code (and commands) are provided in the post.

On the Nefarious Designs blog there's a (very complete) guide to Vagrant and using it to set up easily reproducible versions of your development environment.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past couple of years, Vagrant is the latest development in easily controlled virtualised environments. [...] Vagrant automates creation and provisioning of virtual machines within VirtualBox via the command line, whilst also allowing for easy distribution and reuse across multiple projects. In this article, I'm going to look at how it can make life considerably easier when dealing with development environments.

Included in the post is just about everything you'll need to get started using this powerful tool:

• A link to Vagrant images
• A guide to the VagrantFile
• the Provisioning process
• Interacting/Controllig the Vagrant VMs

He also includes a basic setup of an environment (with the Vagrant config to create it) and an example of using Puppet to provision the Vagrant VMs.

In this new post to his blog Matthew Turland shows how to set up a puppet configuration to deploy and set up an EC2 environment for Drupal.

I'm currently working on a project that involves running Drupal on Amazon EC2. To save time in setting up future new VM instances, I decided to take the opportunity to learn puppet. For the time being, I'm using a single VM to run the full LAMP stack and running puppet without a server by copying my puppet manifest to the VM and using puppet's apply command to apply it locally. However, this manifest can easily be adapted for a multi-VM environment.

He includes the full configuration in the post that does a few things including setting up the correct PHP timezone, starting up the Apache instance, installing a few PHP modules (like PDO, MySQL and GD) and setting up the MySQL server. He also includes the commands needed to run the configuration and point it at the correct EC2 instance.

Joshua Thijssen has shared a handy tip for those using Zend Server on a pupptet-ed server - using a Facter plugin to check for the ZS install and only install what's needed (rather than end up with multiple PHP installs).

This means you should not install the default PHP package for your distribution when the distribution also runs on Zend Server. This Facter plugin will allow you to use the $zendserver fact inside your own manifests to check if Zend server is installed, so you can take measures against installing stuff that is taken care of by ZendServer itself.

You can download the plugin from his github account, https://github.com/jaytaph/puppet-facter-zendserver, and easily install it into your puppet setup.