Vagrant, Symfony and Windows are not incompatibles

At work, I’m using Vagrant on my Windows 10 because Docker really sucks on windows :(
So after promote PuPHPet, I’m now using Scotch Box.

In a few words, this is some features already in this box:

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr)
• PHP 5.6
• Ruby 2.2.x
• MySQL, PostreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB
• Redis, Memcache, Memcached
• Vim, Git, cURL, Composer, Node, NPM, Mailcatcher, Bower, Grunt…
• …

It is a good base.
For my needs, I pimp this box (take a look on my fork (on GitHub)). I found it pretty cool on my own linux… but on my Windows, it’s really SLOW!

Before: running a Symfony app into a Vagrant box

Here is some tip’s to speed up your application.

First step: Install plugins

1. Install VirtualBox Guest plugin

   vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

2. Install Vagrant WinNFSd plugin

   vagrant plugin install vagrant-winnfsd

I don’t reinvent the wheel here. If you type speed up vagrant on windows you will see the same results.
With this config I switch from ~16s to ~4s for a page to load.

Second step: Install PHP7

In my case PHP7 really decrease page loading time. Be careful, installing PHP7 will remove php5.

1. Update package list

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

2. Install PHP7 and remove PHP5

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge php5-common -y
sudo apt-get install -y \
    && php7.0 \
    && php7.0-fpm \
    && php7.0-mysql \
    && php-curl \
    && libapache2-mod-php7.0 \
    && php7.0-mbstring
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove -y

3. Set timezone (i.e. date.timezone = Europe/Paris)

sudo vi /etc/php/7.0/cli/php.ini
sudo vi /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

4. Restart apache service

sudo a2enmod php7.0
sudo service apache2 restart

Now my app run in ~2s.

Third step: Don’t sync cache/log folders with your windows host!

On Benjamin Eberlei’s blog, I found this last tip: put yours logs and cache on non-shared folders.

<?php
public function getCacheDir()
{
    if (in_array($this->environment, array('dev', 'test'))) {
        return '/dev/shm/application-name/cache/' .  $this->environment;
    }

    return parent::getCacheDir();
}

public function getLogDir()
{
    if (in_array($this->environment, array('dev', 'test'))) {
        return '/dev/shm/application-name/logs';
    }

    return parent::getLogDir();
}

If you need, here is some aliases to help you.

# Remove cache
alias cache-clear='rm -rf /dev/shm/application-name/cache/'
# Copy logs into your Sf project
alias cplogs='cp -R /dev/shm/application-name/logs /var/www/application-name/public/app'

And… tadaaaa! It took Some hundred milliseconds ♥ (I also add some SQL request to MySQL… just for fun).

After: running a Symfony app into a Vagrant box

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About the author

Hey, I'm Maxence Poutord, a passionate software engineer. In my day-to-day job, I'm working as a senior front-end engineer at Orderfox. When I'm not working, you can find me travelling the world or cooking.

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