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Reviewboard on VirtualBox

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For my upcoming cf.Objective() presentation on code reviews I needed to setup a working copy of Review Board. I’ve done this before and the installation isn’t too bad, but could be easier. Enter Bitnami who now offer a Review Board ‘stack’.

Bitnami has native installers for Linux as well as ‘virtual’ images for VMWare and VirtualBox. Since I imagine most of my cf.Objective() audience will be on Windows or Mac I opted to use the VM option.

##Environment

  • Host - Ubuntu Linux 11.10
  • Guest - ‘Ubuntu’ version of the Bitnami image which is 10.10.

##Download

##Installation

  1. Install VirtualBox
  2. Unzip Review Board
  3. Run VirtualBox

The Bitnami instructions indicate you can ‘import’ the image they provide (for VMWare) into VirtualBox by importing the supplied bitnami-reviewboard-1.6.5-0-ubuntu-10.10.ovf file. I tried that but quickly ran into several errors.

Being familiar with VirtualBox I opted for the manual setup:

  1. Create a new Virtual Machine and set that it is a Linux (Ubuntu or SuSE) machine.
  2. Configure RAM to 512 or higher.
  3. Choose “existing hard disk” and select the BitNami “vmdk” file.
  4. Once the machine creation finishes, go to Settings -> System -> Processor -> Enable PAE
  5. Go to Storage -> IDE Controller -> Add a new IDE controller and select the BitNami vmdk file.
  6. Remove the SATA hard disk.

At this point they indicate you can start your machine, and I did but I promptly discovered I couldn’t access the VM over the network. After some research and trial and error I discovered I needed to tweak some additional VirtualBox settings, YMMV.

If you do start the machine - take note of the information provided! See the Logging In section below.

##Networking

My home network is setup on 192.168.1.xxx and my router provides DHCP.

When I started the VM it notified me I could access Review Board at 10.0.2.15.

  1. Open your VM’s Settings.
  2. Click Network.
  3. Under the Adaptor 1 tab it probably says Attached to: NAT
  4. Change it to Attached to: Bridged Adaptor
  5. If you have a wired and wireless adaptor you may need to tweak the Name value. On my wireless laptop I had ETH0 and WLAN0. I selected WLAN0.
  6. Click OK
  7. Start your Review Board machine

##Logging In

When started pay attention to the initial screen. This will contain important information in regards to username and passwords, as well as the IP address you need to access Reviewboard.

Review Board

  • It will provide you the login for the Review Board application. In my case it was user/bitnami.
  • It will provide you with the login to the Ubuntu console. In my case it was bitnami/bitnami
  • It will provide you with the IP address of the guest VM to connect to. After making the changes above - my Bitnami stack correctly indicated it had received an address from my DHCP: 192.168.1.7

Open up a browser and enter that IP address and you should be prompted with a Review Board login screen:

Review Board

In addition to Review Board Bitnami has a host of other ‘stacks’ that allow you to quickly setup a proper development environment:

  • Redmine (issue tracker)
  • Subversion (version control)
  • DokuWiki (wiki / documentation)
  • Tomcat / JBoss
  • Generic *AMP stacks (LAMP, WAMP, MAMP)