Testing on Fedora

One of the things that is nice about Fedora is how easy it is to test something very quickly. They provide a considerable number of cloud images suitable for spinning up instances fast. In my case I have a machine with Vagrant and VirtualBox installed, and when we got a complaint recently about PostgreSQL misbehaving with some glibc locales in fedora 23, I wanted to test it. After downloading the image I wanted I was able to get running with this:

vagrant box add --name=f23 Fedora-Cloud-Base-Vagrant-23_Beta-20150915.x86_64.vagrant-virtualbox.box
mkdir f23
cd f23
vagrant init f23
vagrant ssh

It took me about 5 minutes from the time I discovered the image I wanted to test to starting on setting up to build PostgreSQL on it, and most of that was download time.