Scotch Box: A Vagrant LAMP Stack That Just Works

Just a dead-simple local Vagrant LAMP stack for developers

I discovered Scotch Box recently, brought to us by the folks at scotch.io. It actually looks like Nicholas Cerminara has done most of the work, or as least done all of the committing to GitHub. Here’s the Scotch Box announcement at the Scotch.io blog.

After using Scotch Box for a day, I’ve decided this is how I will do all future development work. It’s so easy, and you really don’t need to know much about Vagrant or VirtualBox to get up and running with Scotch Box.

Scotch Box has a repository setup at GitHub that explains how to make use of Scotch Box. Basically, just clone the repository, and then run vagrant up inside that repo.

Scotch Box is currently running Ubuntu 12.04.5. Here’s a bit from the Scotch Box readme:

Scotch Box is a preconfigured Vagrant Box with a full array of LAMP Stack features to get you up and running with Vagrant in no time.

A lot of PHP websites and applications don’t require much server configuration or overhead at first. This box should have all your needs for doing basic development so you don’t have to worry about configuring Vagrant and you can simply focus on your code.

No provisioning tools or setup is really even required with Scotch Box. Since everything is packaged into the box, running “vagrant” is super fast, you’ll never have to worry about your environment breaking with updates, and you won’t need Internet to code.

Bringing Scotch Box Up

Once you’ve run vagrant up, you’ll be able to access your site at http://192.168.33.10/, you should see something similar to the image below.

Useful Stuff in Scotch Box

• PHP 5.5
• No Internet connection required
• PHP errors turned on
• Laravel and WordPress ready (and others)
• Operating System agnostic
• Goodbye XAMPP / WAMP
• New Vagrant version? Update worry free. ScotchBox is very reliable with a lesser chance of breaking with various updates
• Bootstrap and jQuery are saved in the server’s home folder in case you don’t have Internet (usually plains, trains or cars)
• Chef and Puppet ready in case you want to add extra features on Vagrant Up
• Super easy database access and control
  MIT License

Server Components Included

• Apache
• Vim
• MySQL
• PHP 5.5
• Git
• Screen
• Composer
• cURL
• GD and Imagick
• Mcrypt
• Memcache and Memcached

Front End Stuff Included

• NPM
• Grunt
• Bower
• Yeoman
• Gulp

You can SSH to your server as well, by running vagrant ssh. Upon logging in via SSH you’ll see something similar to the image below.

Scotch Box is in its infancy still. It’s initial commit to GitHub was on October 6, 2014 and has about 10 commits in total.

Updating Scotch Box is easy too. To check for an updated version with Vagrant, do vagrant box outdated. That will tell you if there’s a newer version available. If there is a newer version available, you can update to it by running vagrant box update.

Head to the official Scotch Box website for more information on setting up databases, setting a hostname, and for more details on updating the box. Some basic Vagrant commands are also included to help you with basic Vagrant usage (ie: pausing, resuming, or destroying a server).

If you’re a LAMP developer like I am, and are tired of developing on your client’s dev servers, Scotch Box could be a good solution for you to develop locally. It’s sometimes much easier to develop locally then having to rely on a slow dev server provided by your client. :)

All the images in this post are included in the gallery below.