Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART • Hacker News Board

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#11

Post by evilhackerdude » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:20 PM UTC

sammcd wrote: post #2

After talking with a few small PHP teams this seems like the logical conclusion whenever growing a team of PHP developers. Its just very hard to perfectly recreate your server environment locally on multiple OS's. Its a great solution, but I much prefer working with RoR or Python/Django where recreating the server environment locally is much easier.

Bundler was supposed to remedy dependency hell problems and I believe it eventually managed to do that. But boy can I tell you stories about migrating from pre-1.0 bundler versions.

RVM is just great and simple.

What I’m trying to say though: Having done quite some side projects with node, the ruby stuff suddenly feels very enterprisey to me. More and more conventions might make it harder to keep track of everything in the future.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#12

Post by sammcd » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:23 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #7

It's not clear to me why they don't just run development on their local machines. I'm not familiar with PHP, though. I'm all for having a build/test vm, though.

I good PHP environment that models the server is very hard to get going locally. At least on OS X. The only way I could get a good environment for Nginx+MySQL+PHP was to locally run a debian VM in VirtualBox.

Now this doesn't even take into account things like memcached that require a lot more customization.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#13

Post by Legion » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:45 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #7

It's not clear to me why they don't just run development on their local machines. I'm not familiar with PHP, though. I'm all for having a build/test vm, though.

Developers aren't server administrators (usually). It's not the best use of their time.

I wish I had thought of this when we ran into issues with Windows people and Ruby. Too much of their time was spent fussing with stuff and crying about it. :)

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#14

Post by mgrouchy » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:50 PM UTC

I do most of my work in python/django so virtualenv essentially solves much of these problems.

The problem I am running into now is that our production environment is starting to get complicated enough(mysql, redis, 2 different django projects) that testing all the components working together gets more and more difficult all the time.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#15

Post by fleitz » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 11:15 PM UTC

mgrouchy wrote: post #14

I do most of my work in python/django so virtualenv essentially solves much of these problems. The problem I am running into now is that our production environment is starting to get complicated enough(mysql, redis, 2 different django projects) that testing all the components working together gets more and more difficult all the time.

Start scripting your environment, the more repeatable your deploy procedure is the better your deploys will be. The easier your deploys are the more frequently you do them, the more frequently you do them, the better your deploys will be. Rinse wash repeat.

Once you have your env scripted with EC2 you can setup / teardown environments easily for testing.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#16

Post by eli » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 11:25 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #7

It's not clear to me why they don't just run development on their local machines. I'm not familiar with PHP, though. I'm all for having a build/test vm, though.

I've had a setup like this going for years. I'm a big fan.

It's unlikely that your server is the same os as your desktop. So you waste time setting up versions of libraries and services for e.g. windows that don't always work quite the same as in production. Plus you can also take advantage of snapshots to mess around with your local vm, confident that you can always roll back to a known version. You can do simplified load testing without actually crashing your whole machine.

It also means your devs can use whatever OS they want - the hard work of setting up a dev environment is already done.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#17

Post by chrisbolt » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 11:29 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #7

It's not clear to me why they don't just run development on their local machines. I'm not familiar with PHP, though. I'm all for having a build/test vm, though.

It's easier to give a new developer a VM image than have them set up Apache, 2 Apache modules, PHP, 3 PHP extensions, MySQL, memcached, ImageMagick, mplayer, a queueing system, a custom database daemon for statistics, and a Lucene-based search daemon. And all with the same options as production.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#18

Post by evilhackerdude » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 11:31 PM UTC

Legion wrote: post #13

kristianp wrote: post #7

It's not clear to me why they don't just run development on their local machines. I'm not familiar with PHP, though. I'm all for having a build/test vm, though.

Developers aren't server administrators (usually). It's not the best use of their time. I wish I had thought of this when we ran into issues with Windows people and Ruby. Too much of their time was spent fussing with stuff and crying about it. :)

“So now it should work, right?”

-“I’m getting an error”

“Which error?”

-“Unnamed method in [...]”

Then, a mountain of pain and torture later.

"But now it works, ok?”

-“Ok.”

---

Ever had to fix someone else’s system via Skype or phone? I personally believe writing a rails clone in brainfuck is more fun.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#19

Post by sprout » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 11:34 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #10

marte wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

virtualenv

I'd say that seems to cover both bases for not needing a VM. Every language should have something as simple as these. Heck, it should be part of the OS, IMO; why I can't (easily) run two different versions of Firefox with two different profiles at the same time is beyond comprehension.

A VM is a constant time investment, doing it for every language is linear with the number of languages.

Unless there's some serious increases in clock speeds, I'm not sure doing it for every language is worth it. As it is, VMs are a great, general purpose system that are easy to set up, use, and replicate.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#20

Post by leftnode » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 11:51 PM UTC

sammcd wrote: post #2

After talking with a few small PHP teams this seems like the logical conclusion whenever growing a team of PHP developers. Its just very hard to perfectly recreate your server environment locally on multiple OS's. Its a great solution, but I much prefer working with RoR or Python/Django where recreating the server environment locally is much easier.

How is creating the local server environment on RoR or Python/Django easier than PHP/anything?

I've been developing locally for years and while I can't mimic the exact hardware of the live server, I wouldn't be able to do that regardless of stack I chose.