Although Vagrant is very useful for ensuring consistency between development environments, it’s quite demanding on system resources. Running a virtual machine introduces quite a bit of overhead, and it can be troublesome to provision.
This week I was introduced to Lando as an alternative to Vagrant. Rather than running a virtual machine like Vagrant does by default, Lando instead spins up Docker containers for the services you need, meaning it has considerably less overhead than Vagrant. It also includes presets for a number of frameworks and CMS’s, including:
- Drupal 7
- Drupal 8
- Wordpress
- Laravel
Considering that Vagrant needs quite a bit of boilerplate to set up the server for different types of projects, this gives Lando an obvious advantage. The only issue I’ve had with it is that it’s been unreliable when I’ve had to use it on Windows, which I don’t do much anyway.
Getting started
Lando requires that you have Docker installed. Once that’s done you can download and install it fro the website. Then you can run lando init to set it up:
$ lando init ? What recipe do you want to use? wordpress ? Where is your webroot relative to the init destination? . ? What do you want to call this app? wp-site NOW WE'RE COOKING WITH FIRE!!! Your app has been initialized! Go to the directory where your app was initialized and run `lando start` to get rolling. Check the LOCATION printed below if you are unsure where to go. Here are some vitals: NAME wp-site LOCATION /home/matthew/Projects/wp-site RECIPE wordpress DOCS https://docs.devwithlando.io/tutorials/wordpress.html
Here I’ve chosen the wordpress recipe, in the current directory, with the name wp-site. This generates the following file as .lando.yml:
name: wp-site recipe: wordpress config: webroot: .
Then, if we run lando start, it will set up the required services:
$ lando start landoproxyhyperion5000gandalfedition_proxy_1 is up-to-date Creating network "wpsite_default" with the default driver Creating volume "wpsite_appserver" with default driver Creating volume "wpsite_data" with default driver Creating volume "wpsite_data_database" with default driver Creating wpsite_appserver_1 ... Creating wpsite_database_1 ... Creating wpsite_database_1 Creating wpsite_appserver_1 ... done % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 4454k 100 4454k 0 0 3288k 0 0:00:01 0:00:01 --:--:-- 3290k OS: Linux 4.13.0-32-generic #35-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 25 09:13:46 UTC 2018 x86_64 Shell: PHP binary: /usr/local/bin/php PHP version: 7.1.13 php.ini used: WP-CLI root dir: phar://wp-cli.phar WP-CLI vendor dir: phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor WP_CLI phar path: /tmp WP-CLI packages dir: WP-CLI global config: WP-CLI project config: WP-CLI version: 1.5.0 BOOMSHAKALAKA!!! Your app has started up correctly. Here are some vitals: APPSERVER URLS https://localhost:32802 http://localhost:32803 http://wp-site.lndo.site https://wp-site.lndo.site
Note the APPSERVER URLS section - the site can be accessed locally via HTTP or HTTPS. For this recipe, it also installs WP CLI.
If we run docker ps, we can see that it’s running three Docker containers:
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 2e920e152091 devwithlando/php:7.1-apache "/lando-entrypoint.s…" 16 minutes ago Up 16 minutes 0.0.0.0:32803->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:32802->443/tcp wpsite_appserver_1 82ea60b1214f mysql:latest "/lando-entrypoint.s…" 16 minutes ago Up 16 minutes 0.0.0.0:32801->3306/tcp wpsite_database_1 e51d831199d7 traefik:1.3-alpine "/lando-entrypoint.s…" About an hour ago Up About an hour 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:443->443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:58086->8080/tcp landoproxyhyperion5000gandalfedition_proxy_1
Apache lives in one container, MySQL in another, while the third runs Traefik, a lightweight load balancer, which listens on port 80. Traefik does the work of redirecting HTTP requests to the right place.
As I’ve been unhappy with the amount of resources Vagrant uses for a while, and I usually run Ubuntu (making using Docker straightforward), I’m planning on using Lando extensively in future. It’s lighter and faster to set up, and has sane defaults for most of the frameworks and CMS’s I use regularly, making it generally quicker and easier to work with.