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Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

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Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#41

Post by thefreshteapot »

sammcd wrote: post #12
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.

Im confused, this post of yours seems a tad contradictory to your post about "setting up environments in RoR etc".

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#42

Post by hdeshev »

This all VM thing is fine and dandy if you want to have an accessible mirror of your staging machine and reduce unnecessary stages. Although that in itself looks fishy - if developers want to stage something just to see if it works, then something is seriously wrong with your process or developers.

I'm amazed at the level of sophistication in this setup - using virtual machines and TCP proxies that do text replaces seems too much. They could have just built the configurability in the damn application. I have a .NET app that normally gets deployed on three servers and uses various remote resources like Amazon SQS queues, but I easily built a configuration abstraction similar to Rails' environments that lets me deploy on a single machine and even test locally with a debugger attached.

My point is that this problem looks as if it got solved at the wrong level of abstraction. Which, obviously, made it unnecessarily hard and complex. If I had to tackle it, I'd make sure developers do the right thing and try to make the app configurable enough first.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#43

Post by tomedme »

hdeshev wrote: post #42

This all VM thing is fine and dandy if you want to have an accessible mirror of your staging machine and reduce unnecessary stages. Although that in itself looks fishy - if developers want to stage something just to see if it works, then something is seriously wrong with your process or developers. I'm amazed at the level of sophistication in this setup - using virtual machines and TCP proxies that do text replaces s…

The mind boggles. There's probably a rockstar in there looking to put something on their CV/resume. Whatever the case, it smells wrong.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#44

Post by yycom »

Jach wrote: post #38

If commits were an issue before this, they should really have considered using git or something. You shouldn't aim for fewer commits, but less expensive commits, i.e. nothing goes over a network. Plus you can squash later if you really need to. Anyway, VMs are cool but has anyone tried developing with NixOS? It seems even more suited for the tasks they want since it has rollbacks and so on: http://nixos.org/

Isn't the expense of frequent commits the cost of composing an intelligible commit message?

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#45

Post by Groxx »

andrewf wrote: post #30
Groxx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been a while since I've done this; but: * Install your different Firefox versions in different locations (so one doesn't overwrite the other) * Use "firefox -ProfileManager" to create at least one different 'profile', which is Firefox's user data set * Use "firefox -P -no-remote" to launch Firefox. -no-remote allows multiple Firefox instances to run on the same machine. -P profilename is necessary because you ne…

Ooh, I'll have to try that. I've been using different profiles, but didn't know about the last step.

Still; mindboggling. Different version = different binary launched, which accesses a different and non-locked profile. Why the hell does it instead open a new window of the currently-running version?

As a heads-up to anyone considering this: Sync doesn't (currently) like multiple versions. 3.6.10 won't sync now that I've hooked up some 4 betas.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#46

Post by aaronblohowiak »

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. :)

JRuby cn also be a good way to run ruby on windows.
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