Introducing Lima to Trellis for Faster Local Development

trellis-cli v1.10.0 was released last week which added built-in integration for managing virtual machines in development via Lima as an alternative to Vagrant.

Adding Lima support to Trellis

Trellis users on macOS are able to replace VirtualBox (or Parallels) along with Vagrant on their machines with this new Lima integration. Lima utilizes the new macOS virtualization framework which is much faster than using Vagrant.

When using Lima with Trellis for local development, your file system changes should be reflected instantly. For folks that are using Trellis for local development right now, you might sometimes run into issues due to the NFS file syncing which can be slow and frustrating.

Call for testing

We need your help to make sure that the Lima integration in Trellis is working without issues before we mark it as non-experimental. We’ve been testing it out on this site, but need to know if anyone runs into any issues on their own projects. To get started, first upgrade trellis-cli:

$ brew upgrade trellis-cli

There are 5 new commands available with trellis-cli v1.10.0:

$ trellis vm start
$ trellis vm stop
$ trellis vm delete
$ trellis vm shell
$ trellis vm sudoers

For most use cases, trellis vm start can be run without any customization first.

Non-macOS users

For Linux and Windows users on WSL, we’ll be adding LXD VM support.

Keep an eye on trellis-PR #363 for progress.

Testing feedback

Please let us know any feedback or suggestions you have on Roots Discourse, and report any bugs you may run into on the trellis-cli repo.

Also see trellis-cli PR #346 for the full implementation.