Goals
- Explain how to utilise a FOLIO virtual machine (VM).
Prerequisites
- Vagrant – Recent version.
- VirtualBox –
Determine the version of VirtualBox to match your version of
vagrant. - curl – Only ‘curl’ commands are shown in this tutorial. To use curl to interact with Okapi from outside the VM, of course curl is needed on the host system. Note that Vagrant has a packaged curl, so that can be used from within the VM. Easier-to-use interactive and command-line tools are available (see FAQ How to use APIs). Some tools (such as HTTPie) enable copy-and-paste of the actual ‘curl’ command.
Background
Each night the FOLIO reference environments are rebuilt using the current state of development.
The continuous integration also constructs various Vagrant boxes. These are available for local use, providing a ready-to-run self-contained operating system environment and up-to-date FOLIO instance. (Note that that link is only for explaining the various boxes. The first Lesson of this Tutorial will establish one for local use.)
Note: Using the "folio/release" VM will require your host machine to have sufficient resources available (e.g. memory).
To instead use the "folio/snapshot" VM, which has the full set of FOLIO apps, will require even more resources.
Troubleshooting and known issues
There are troubleshooting notes in the folio-ansible repository, so generally those will not be repeated here.
Lessons and steps
Follow each lesson sequentially:
- Create workspace and launch VM and update box.
- VM system overview and viewing logfiles.
- Interact with the FOLIO VM.
- Conduct local development.