Nittany Vagrant is an attempt to provide a full stack built on CentOS 6.5 that mirrors most of what can be gained in using RHEL distributions of Linux. It also seeks to boil site building down to a series of questions via Drush Recipes and bash scripts. Upon logging into a nittany-vagrant instance for the first time the developer is presented with a series of questions about what kind of site they are building and what they’d like the system to do for them.

Using this workflow the developer can do everything from setting up the server, setting up drupal, preconfiguring it with common modules, configuring for a public site vs private, configuring a front-end development stack and more just by answering questions. Another goal of nittany-vagrant is to provide a series of scripts and standard development / migration practices that allow for all PSU and non-PSU drupal developers to easily pull sites down from production and work on them locally, then push back to production / staging when the time is right.

Eventually we’d like to allow Nittany to operate in a rapid prototype generation mode which will ask enough questions to get at what someone wants to build to hopefully do most of the work for them; allowing for prototype systems to be generated in minutes instead of months.