Using a Virtual Machine - Run our Vagrant Machine w/ Relational Database

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Description

This repository contains Web applications that queries a database and then dynamically generates complete web pages and API endpoints. These projects are set up to use a virtual machine - Vagrant (VM) to run our database server.

Restaurant Menu App Deployed via Heroku here - https://restaurant-menu-app2.herokuapp.com/

About Our Projects

1. Forum

• Learning CRUD operations by using PostgreSQL inside our Virtual machine to populate a database using the PSQL Database command line.

2. Restaurent-Menu App

• We use an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) layer - SQLAlchemy to interact with our database.
• GET and POST requests that translate to CRUD operations.
• Using the Flask framework for development of our application.

We need to be able to successfully run the virtual machine in order to view our projects.

The VM is a Linux server system that runs on top of your own computer.

• We can share files easily between our computer and the VM.
• We'll be running a web service inside the VM which we'll be able to access from our regular browser locally.

We're using tools called Vagrant and VirtualBox to install and manage the VM. You'll need to install these to run the applications.

Prerequisites -

• We'll be using a Unix-style terminal on your computer. On Windows, we recommend using the Git Bash terminal that comes with the Git software (www.git-scm.com).
• For Windows users, you may use putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) for SSH implementation.

Instructions

• VirtualBox is the software that actually runs the virtual machine. Install VirtualBox - (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).
• Vagrant is the software that configures the VM and lets you share files between your host computer and the VM's filesystem. Install Vagrant - (https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html).
• To find out if vagrant has successfully installed type vagrant --version into git bash or cmd

Configure the VM

• Use Github to fork and clone or download the the repository - https://github.com/udacity/fullstack-nanodegree-vm.
• Once you download the files and end up with a new local directory containing the VM files.
• Change to this directory in your terminal with cd.
• Inside, you will find another directory called vagrant. Change directory to the vagrant directory.

Start the Virtual Machine

• Inside the vagrant subdirectory, run the command vagrant up
• This will cause Vagrant to download the Linux operating system and install it. This may take quite a while (many minutes) depending on how fast your Internet connection is.
• Once you get your shell prompt back. Run vagrant ssh to log in to your newly installed Linux VM
• If you have trouble with an SSH client you may use the authentication information provided and use Putty to explore the VM via SSH

My Authentication Info

• Host: 127.0.0.1
• Port: 2222
• config.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
• config.ssh.password = "55562eefdc557c810fbaca5f"

Running the Database

• The PostgreSQL database server will automatically be started inside the VM.
• Run psql inside the VM command-line tool to access it and run SQL statements: eg. select 2 + 2 as sum;

Logging out and in

• Run vagrant reload if you edit the Vagrant file or make other changes to code that would affect the virtual machine.
• If you type exit (or Ctrl-D) at the shell prompt inside the VM, you will be logged out, and put back into your host computer's shell. To log back in, make sure you're in the same directory and type vagrant ssh again.
• To exit Vagrant after the test simply type logout
• To momentarily stop Vagrant running in the background when done type vagrant halt
• vagrant destroy to destroy your virtual machine. The source code and the content of the data directory will remain unchanged.
• If you reboot your computer, you will need to run vagrant up to restart the VM.

View Projects

• Use ls to view files in the current directory, the forum and the restaurent-menu directories should be present.
• cd into each respective directory and view each respective README.md file to instructions on how to run each project and serve it on localhost.

Resources

• Udacity FSND Webcast on setting up Vagrant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djnqoEO2rLc