As part of our ongoing work on Mercator (a Magento Community Edition distribution launched last year), we have released a demo Vagrant box, available for immediate download. Mercator has recently been updated to merge changes from the Magento CE 1.9.0.1 release, and now includes features such as a streamlined checkout, responsive design using the Bootstrap framework, and improved search functionality. Rather than having to set up a development environment and install Mercator, the box is fully configured and ready for use. The box runs Mercator on HHVM, includes services like Redis and Elasticsearch pre-installed and configured, and uses the Magento CE 1.8 sample data.

The store switcher has been configured with both Mercator's Bootstrap theme, the standard Magento theme and the new Magento CE 1.9 responsive web design ("RWD") theme. Note that the RWD theme isn't fully compatible with some of Mercator's features (i.e. AJAX layered navigation) just yet.

To get started with a Vagrant Mercator VM:

  1. Install Vagrant (version 1.1 or greater).
  2. Download the box file (MD5: c865ce46da6c4bcb41f0c422fec18b0a):
    wget http://dl.fontis.com.au/mercator.box
  3. Import the box:
    vagrant box add --name mercator mercator.box
  4. Initialise and start a new Mercator VM:
    mkdir mercator_vm
cd mercator_vm
vagrant init mercator
vagrant up
  5. View Mercator in your web browser:
    http://127.0.0.1:8081/

For more information on using the VM, including admin details, see the Mercator wiki.

Mercator is still a work in progress and is under active development on GitHub. Contributions and any feedback are welcome.