The Microwizard

The Microwizard base system runs inside of a VirtualBox VM. We provision the VM using Vagrant and then use a combination of shell scripts, Ansible playbooks, and custom code to smooth over the experience. Developers must be running a modern Linux distribution or Mac OS X (we’ve tested on Fedora 22 and OS 10.10 Yosemite) and should have the following software installed before trying to use Datawire Microwizard:

Software	Version	Instructions
Ansible	>=1.9.4	sudo pip install ansible or see the official install instructions
Vagrant	>=1.7.4	Install instructions
Virtual Box	>= 5.0	Install instructions

To get started, do the following:

1. Clone the Microwizard project on GitHub, as well as some of the Git submodules linked into this repository:
   
   git clone --recursive git@github.com:datawire/microwizard.git
   
   Note: Using the –recursive flag is equivalent to running git submodule init && git submodule update after a normal git clone command.
2. Start vagrant by running vagrant up. This will take some time as the Microwizard bootstraps inside the VM, possibly as long as 15-20 minutes depending on your system. Be patient, as this step is automating a lot of configuration so you don’t have to do it manually.
3. Once the initial provisioning has completed run ./scripts/lobsters-up to bring up the demonstration monolith application. Note that it usually takes from 3 to 5 minutes for Lobsters to fully provision itself for use (and can take even longer at times).
4. Go to http://127.0.0.1:3000/ to see the Lobster application running. You’ll notice that this web page has a link at the top called “Most Popular Users” - this is not normally present in a standard Lobsters install; we added it to the monolith to provide access to data from the new microservice.