Developing inside a virtual machine • Hacker News Board

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#31

Post by makeitdouble » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 1:59 AM UTC

tonymet wrote: post #28

Windows 11 and WSL manages this well . For those developing linux apps & containers using VS Code, you'll find the Windows 11 experience to be very good. You can code against WSL which offers the more popular distros, or use HyperV to run your own custom VMs.

In general, yes.

One weird quirk: networking can be peculiar. Windows creates a magic bridging between the host and WSL, and as anything magic, it can break for specific use cases.

VPN is one [0]: my WSL instances lose outgoing networking when connecting to our company VPN. There are workarounds but none are trivial.

[0] https://superuser.com/questions/1715764/wsl2-has-no-connecti...

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#32

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:06 AM UTC

tkiolp4 wrote: post #11

Why does the author need a “remote ssh” plugin in their VSCode? I usually develop inside a VM as well, with my IDE running in the host… but what I do is to mount a shared directory for the code between the host and the VM. Works pretty fast. Don’t understand the need for Tailscale either. When I’m running services or dbs inside the VM, I can easily access them if needed from the host (either by IP or by the hostname…

[deleted]

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#33

Post by raihansaputra » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:10 AM UTC

Are you installing the project dependencies on the VM directly or in a docker container? I'm curious how well docker on top of the Ubuntu vm works. Orbstack is great for personal use, but some companies don't want to pay for it, and this might be an alternative to have a better docker experience on macOS.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#34

Post by tonymet » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:16 AM UTC

For the rest of you, don't be fooled by Darwin, it's a dusty BSD in Linux clothing

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#35

Post by mmwelt » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

This all looks fine for developing server apps that don't need a GUI, particularly as long as 3D accelerated graphics aren't needed. You don't even need to be using/developing a 3D game or application, just using a modern GUI without too much lag now seems to require 3D acceleration.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#36

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:32 AM UTC

I accidentally typed 'npm install axioss' (extra s typo) this morning.

When it successfully installed, it was terrifying to think that all source code, private files were instantly shared with malicious actors. Not only that, there was the prospect of having to somehow wipe and ensure all files were clean, reinstall the OS, and the possibility of some bootloader remnant still lurking.

In this case, it seems that a security package had replaced a previous malicious package, making this instance benign. But it feels like I am only one typo away from an absolute catastrophe every time I install a package.

VM seems like a good way to add some protection.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#37

Post by weikju » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:33 AM UTC

mmwelt wrote: post #35

This all looks fine for developing server apps that don't need a GUI, particularly as long as 3D accelerated graphics aren't needed. You don't even need to be using/developing a 3D game or application, just using a modern GUI without too much lag now seems to require 3D acceleration.

3D acceleration is pretty well supported in VMware and sorta works well in UTM

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#38

Post by UltraSane » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:35 AM UTC

raihansaputra wrote: post #33

Are you installing the project dependencies on the VM directly or in a docker container? I'm curious how well docker on top of the Ubuntu vm works. Orbstack is great for personal use, but some companies don't want to pay for it, and this might be an alternative to have a better docker experience on macOS.

docker in a VM works fine because docker isn't a VM and just uses Linux features like pivot-root, namespaces, and cgroups to isolate programs. At least on x86 CPUs you can even do nested virtualization if the CPU supports it.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#39

Post by UltraSane » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:40 AM UTC

mongol wrote: post #5

I do something similar but using WSL on Windows. But something I really, really hate is dealing with special certificate handling required to pass the corporate Zscaler proxy. I think it works somewhat transparent on the Windows host, but repeating the setup in every VM is such a pain.

I have administered Zscaler and I bet the issue is that Zscaler is doing TLS MITM and every windows machine joined to the domain is configured to trust the Zscaler wildcard cert used for every site. This usually just works for anything joined to the domain but the cert has to be manually trusted for anything else. And yes it is amazingly annoying. I try to write a script or bake the cert into an OS image.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#40

Post by cachvico » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 2:42 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #4

Beats developing inside a docker container.

Does it though? I've developed in remote VMs before and the advantages are clear, but having a fully containerized development environment is really nice too because you can tear the whole thing down and rebuild at the drop of a hat. You can achieve that with a VM and scripts, but a Dockerfile is very lightweight and standard.

Edit: Unless you literally mean "editing code in a container with vi". In which case yes I'd go for the VM too!