We have a web server that’s running CentOS 5 on bare-metal x86, and an old Mac Pro with an Intel processor sitting around locally. I’d like to clone the web server onto the Mac so it can be used as a test environment, but I’d like to keep the software as close as possible – especially the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack currently serving the website. Keeping the Linux would be best, but optional.
Since they’re both *NIX systems, is there any best built-in or popular tool to do this with?
Virtualizing the server into an image on the Mac would probably be ok too, but I’m still not sure of the best way to do that.
rpm -qa to get a list of installed rpms on the source server
Install Centos 5 on your new system.
rpm -qa
diff the two package lists
yum install the missing rpms
(you might need to find and add some additional repositories like rpmforge)
That is a better, more long term solution because you can effectively document your image so it reproducible.
I would go further and create a docker image from centos based image. If you build it the image from a dockerfile, that records each step of the build very clearly. That would create a Linux container that you can run easily on almost any Linux hosting environment, including popular cloud services. It also allows you to put the image build dockerfile alongside your software development under the same version control.
However…that is a more work, for a longer term solution.
So there you go, a quick and dirty fix or a devops project that makes it all future-proof and portable.
