Quick test installations with MageSpawner

Most Magento developers will have at least a few skeleton Magento installations within their development environment. MageSpawner is a useful tool for setting up these installations real quick. One of the cumbersome chores of Magento development is setting up a fresh test installation to boot. Whether you want to test an extension for backwards compatibility or see how it performs in a clean installation, getting through the Magento installer is something most people rather avoid. Meet MageSpawner. MageSpawner is a clean and hassle-free shell-script for setting up Magento installations for testing purposes. With a simple command line installer and little to no configuration, you will have that legacy 1.5.1 testing environment set up in a breeze. With dependencies probably already prepared in your development environment, installation of MageSpawner is not much more than git clone or downloading a packaged stable release After running the ./install script, you will be presented with a list of Magento CE versions which will then be automatically fetched from the official Magento website with either wget or cURL. The Magento installer will be stepped through programmatically with the settings found in your configuration file. An initial re-index, vhost-configuration and the correct permissions will be set on the files and directories for your installation. If you are done with it, the ./remove script will conveniently clean up all of which was set up. Both the installer and removal-script can be initiated with pre-populated arguments. For example, this means that for maximum effectivity you can alias them to something like “up1810” and “down1810” to start deploying immediately. I.e:

alias up1810="/path/to/MageSpawner/install --mageversion ce1810 --magename ce1810 --magedomain ce1810.magentoshops.vm --modman y"
alias down1810="/path/to/MageSpawner/remove --mageshopcode ce1810"

Currently at version 0.4, MageSpawner is available under the Apache License on Github. If you feel like tweaking it for your exact needs, you shouldn’t encounter too much of a problem as the source code is cleanly outlined and properly documented (contrary to some other shell-scripts!). Concluding, MageSpawner is a really handy tool of which we see no reason it shouldn’t belong in your Magento development toolkit.