Running Vagrant on Windows

Recently Packt Publishing kindly gave away Learning PHP 7 in a short 24 hour promotion. I've been going through it and had a problem setting up Vagrant 1.9.3 on Windows. Specifically running vagrant up returned this error

C:/Program Files (x86)/HashiCorp/Vagrant/embedded/gems/gems/vagrant-1.9.3/lib/vagrant/util/is_port_open.rb:21:in `initialize': The requested address is not valid in its context. - connect(2) for "0.0.0.0" port 8080 (Errno::EADDRNOTAVAIL) 

Here is the reported error and fix Vagrant 1.9.3 up fails.

None of this is the book's falt of course. Technology changes fast and it's tough to keep up to date with it.

Next problem I had was the book assumes you have an ssh client installed on windows, which I didn't, so the command vagrant ssh returned another error. Although this time, the error simply instructed me to install an ssh client and even suggested some. I chose Git, but found there was one more step to do after installing it. You need to add C:\Program Files\Git\bin and C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin to your Windows environment path. This latter path contains ssh.exe along with a bunch of other tools.

Now you can easily run vagrant up and vagrant ssh from your project folder path.

The chapter index in this book looks fantastic! There are lots of new things I need to learn there, and some other things I should master. Good luck.

QPython Hello World over SSH

QPython is a script engine that allows you to run python programs on Android. It comes with SL4A (Scripting Layer for Android) built in. SL4A has access to many of the APIs available to full-fledged Android applications, but has a greatly simplified interface that makes it easy to get things done by wrapping it in Python modules. It supports my really old Gingerbread 2.3.5 OS and can be installed directly from the PlayStore. It really is a great piece of standalone software that will get you coding in minutes, but I decided to run this over SSH with SSHDroid. Take your time to properly setup and protect SSHDroid, get things like the IP address, then try this hello world application.

On your local PC, create a file called test.py and add

import androidhelper
droid=androidhelper.Android()
droid.makeToast("hello world!")

Copy it to the QPython scripts folder on the SD card (note, your ssh port number and IP Address will be different)

scp -P 2017 test.py root@192.168.0.109:/mnt/sdcard/qpython/scripts

To test the script, you can do it via the QPython GUI interface. You can also run it by calling QPython's python interpreter from a logged in SSH session, and pass it your script to execute. It's a bit like calling python test.py

ssh -p 2017 root@192.168.0.109
/data/data/org.qpython.qpy/files/bin/qpython.sh /mnt/sdcard/qpython/scripts/test.py

If all looks good, you might want to now call it over SSH. Log out of your SSH session. Wrap your whole command in an alias to issue a quick command from your Linux terminal

alias phone-helloworld = 'ssh -p 2017 root@192.168.0.109 "/data/data/org.qpython.qpy/files/bin/qpython.sh /mnt/sdcard/qpython/scripts/test.py"'