If you want to join lib.reviews development, you now have the option of using Vagrant to get a local development environment up and running. This is thanks to a pull request by Ori Livneh, who also pioneered the use of Vagrant at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Essentially, if you have a working installation of Vagrant and Virtualbox, getting a local install up and running is as simple as running the command vagrant up in a directory that contains a complete checkout of our GitHub repository. Give it a few minutes, and you’ll be able to access a fresh lib.reviews install locally at localhost:8080.
This is not necessarily much easier than following the installation instructions, especially if you’re familiar with Node.js and unfamiliar with Vagrant. The key benefit of using an environment like Vagrant is that the difficulty of getting a predictable local development environment up and running does not increase as the number of dependencies goes up. For example, if we end up adding an external message queue, or a search engine like ElasticSearch, Vagrant (if we update our configuration to reflect those additions) will install and configure those dependencies for you.
And although the environment is virtualized, the codebase is accessible from your host system, so you can use your favorite code editor without any performance penalty.
Thanks again to Ori for working on this change to make development more accessible!