Introduction

Virtual Gemstone creates a fully functioning VirtualBox virtual machine that runs smalltalk in the Gemstone Object Oriented Database proxied behind Nginx, a high performance easy configuration webserver. 
The nginx installation is configured to use ssl by default, because we care about a secure browsing experience for our users, and we want to use the same configuration in development as in production.
Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com) and veewee are used to generate a fresh 'box' from a debian iso.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/<repository>/virtual-gemstone.git 

=create a vagrant base box using veewee:=
 cd virtual-gemstone/veewee
 vagrant basebox build 'gemstone'

run integration specs:
 vagrant basebox validate gemstone

create a .box file in the current directory, for reuse or export to other users:
 vagrant basebox export gemstone

add the box to the list of boxes on the current machine, so you can vagrant box init from it later:
 vagrant box add 'gemstone' 'gemstone.box'

check that it exists:
 vagrant box list

Now you have a running box. Next step is to populate your newly created box. Just do

 cd virtual-gemstone/vagrant
 vagrant up 

If you want to know the details please visit http://vagrantup.com

test it:

log in to the box

vagrant ssh

use the text browser in the box to see the site

(todo, nginx recipe not completed yet).
lynx http://localhost

or as soon as SSL is in place:

lynx https://localhost

How it works
Virtual Gemstone is built on Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com), a command line interface that lets you create, destroy VMs at will, and run Chef configuration management scripts
We use veewee to generate the vagrant vm from a standard ubuntu 11.04 LTS VM, so you can be 100% sure where your VM comes from, and you can configure it as you wish.

Credits