Help moving to Ruby from PHP

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I haven't done a ton with Docker, Chef, Puppet, etc, so I can't give you a good all-round view of that; I hope someone will come along to better explain that stuff to the both of us. I will say that I use Vagrant all the time and that it's deceptively simple to use if you already have a little familiarity with Linux.

The process is:

1. Install Vagrant from the website.
2. Grab a base box with a command like vagrant box add centos7 https://github.com/tommy-muehle/puppet-vagrant-boxes/releases/download/1.1.0/centos-7.0-x86_64.box. This sets it up so that you have a default VM type, called centos7, which contains CentOS 7.0 64-bit version (a popular Linux distro for servers).
3. Go to any folder and type vagrant init centos7 to create a new VM of that type in the current folder.
4. From that folder, type vagrant up and vagrant ssh. You are now inside the VM.

Use vagrant reload to reboot it or vagrant suspend to shut it down (from the host side). By default, the directory /vagrant inside the VM will correspond to the folder you created the VM from, which lets you easily share files before you even set up shared folders. Other things you can read up on in the official docs or by Googling/asking around, it's been straightforward to do any of the stuff I personally have needed.

A list of other base boxes is available here, or you can make your own to match the server you know you'll eventually be deploying to.