[Building Sakai] Sakai quickstart with vagrant and puppet

[Zach A. Thomas]

Hi, everybody.

Back in the early days of Sakai, I used to make screencasts to help developers get their environments ready to work on Sakai.

Nowadays, there's a better way. With the tools we now have available, it's possible to fully automate the setup of new environments. I've been meaning to try this out with vagrant  (http://vagrantup.com) and puppet (https://puppetlabs.com/puppet/what-is-puppet/), and I've got something working:

https://github.com/zathomas/sakai-vagrant

The details are in the README there. It's still non-zero effort, and that first download/checkout/build takes a loooong time, but it's a neat way to screen away the complexity.

I welcome feedback and/or pull requests.

regards,
Zach Thomas

P.S. As a side effect of this work, I found out why Sakai breaks[1] with the standard tomcat7 package available from the Linux package managers. If anyone is interested in that, I'll talk about it in another thread.

[1]http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cms.sakai.devel/29217