General

Bludit Vagrant

The goal of this project is to create a quick virtual machine environment with a Bludit installation for testing and development purposes. You can halt and resume the VM without overwriting your Bludit install.

The following technologies are automatically installed for you:

  • Ubuntu Jammy (22.04 LTS)
  • Apache 2
  • PHP 8
  • Bludit (Latest Version)

Pre-Installation

  1. Install Vagrant
  2. Install VirtualBox

Installation Instructions

  1. Find a directory on your computer where you'd like to install this repo
  2. Run git clone https://github.com/jeremehancock/Bludit-Vagrant.git
  3. Run cd Bludit-Vagrant
  4. Run vagrant up

On the first vagrant up the provisioner will:

  • Install Apache 2, PHP 8, and the required PHP extensions
  • Query the GitHub API for the latest Bludit release
  • Download and extract the zip into /var/www/html/bludit (synced to localhost/www/html/bludit on your host)
  • Drop a marker file (.bludit-installed) so subsequent provisions skip the download
  • Configure Apache (mod_rewrite, virtual host with DocumentRoot pointing at the Bludit directory)
  • Start Apache

Usage

  1. Wait for the vagrant up process to finish and the VM to be ready
  2. Point your web browser to http://localhost:8080 to view your Bludit site
  3. Follow the steps to complete the Bludit installation
  4. If you'd like a shell inside the running VM:
    vagrant ssh
  5. Bludit files are located in localhost/www/html/bludit on your local machine and are synced to /var/www/html/bludit inside the VM

Start / Stop

Because Bludit lives in a synced folder on your host, you can halt and resume the VM freely without losing your site.

  • Halt the VM (keep data):
    vagrant halt
  • Start it again later:
    vagrant up
  • Reload the VM (apply Vagrantfile changes):
    vagrant reload

Upgrade

Bludit is only downloaded and copied on the first vagrant up. After that, re-running vagrant provision or vagrant up --provision will re-apply the Apache/PHP provisioning steps but will not touch your existing Bludit install. This is tracked by the marker file localhost/www/html/bludit/.bludit-installed.

To force a fresh Bludit download (overwriting your site):

  1. Back up localhost/www/html/bludit first
  2. Delete the marker file:
    rm localhost/www/html/bludit/.bludit-installed
  3. Re-run provisioning:
    vagrant provision

A forced re-install will overwrite custom modifications to Bludit. It will not overwrite the content or settings that you have applied in the Bludit admin panel (those live under bl-content/ and are preserved), but you should still back up first.

Cleanup

  • Halt the VM but keep your Bludit site on disk:
    vagrant halt
  • Destroy the VM, but keep your local Bludit install:
    vagrant destroy -f
  • Destroy the VM and remove your local Bludit install:
    vagrant destroy -f
rm -rf localhost/www/html/bludit

Project Layout

Bludit-Vagrant/
├── Vagrantfile              # VM definition (Ubuntu 22.04), port forward, synced folder
├── setup/
│   └── bootstrap.sh         # Installs Apache/PHP and downloads latest Bludit on first run
└── localhost/
    └── www/
        └── html/            # Synced to /var/www/html inside the VM
            └── bludit/      # Bludit lives here after first vagrant up (gitignored)

AI Disclosure

This project was originally developed without the use of AI. It has since been updated to a more modern stack with the help of AI.

Links