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Developing inside a virtual machine

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Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#111

Post by lizknope »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #107
lizknope wrote: post #90

Are most companies this flexible in allowing developers to install whatever they want? > My physical machine is a 2023 MacBook Pro with M2 Pro CPU > I’m using VMWare Fusion Pro > Quite often I’ve found developers frowning up Ubuntu and preaching for folks to use NixOS, Arch, Debian or other distros. The reality for me was Ubuntu was the fastest way to get set up and now I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor desig…

I work mostly in web / server side development, it's not really a problem I've had for a number of years now. Some of my colleagues use various linux distros, others macos. No one is using Windows that I know of. Each project we have requires a specific tool chain version (python, elixir, ...) and specific versions of things like postgres. All dependencies are listed with some kind dependency definition file (pyproje…

That sounds great. I probably haven't asked my software friends about their setups in 5-10 years.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#112

Post by bluehatbrit »

malux85 wrote: post #8
dsfsaff wrote: post #7

I have used a Virtual Box VM with a Ubuntu guest for years and it has worked great. It's as close to the VM's in prod you can get.

I used to do that, but now that all of our microservices are dockerized every microservice has its own docker container Vscode supports remote containers, so everyone in the org just develops INSIDE a replica of the prod container All containers run remotely on enormous machines with 800+ GB of RAM and 8+ GPUs It’s trivial to share environments now because you just open the project and the dev container starts up and…

Do you have any more detail on how you're handling this on a shared host? My understanding is that the base remote containers + remote ssh extensions would require the code to exist directly on the remote host, and then the container to be created afterwards (and bind to the host directory etc). Is this what you're doing?

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#113

Post by homebrewer »

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #36

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 se…

You can wrap node and its package manager into something like bubblewrap, which will remove access to basically everything but the project root directory (including your home directory with its browser profiles and ssh keys).

I use this script with an additional seccomp filter that also denies access to privileged syscalls, but I don't remember where the filter came from, so I won't post it here — you won't be able to audit it easily as it's basically a compiled binary.

https://0x0.st/8zWK.sh

Place the script anywhere and create symlinks named 'node'/'npm'/'yarn'/etc pointing to it, putting them into the start of your $PATH. Run your commands as usual. Use a 'bash' symlink to see what it looks like inside the sandbox.

It's not as good as a VM, but much more convenient.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#114

Post by TowerTall »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #72
TowerTall wrote: post #58

I run my entire work computer inside of a VM. I work from home and have a powerfull desktop i use for my private stuff hooked up to my 3 monitors. My work pc is a vmware vm running inside of vmware pro. I can minimize the work vm and work it out my sight or I can selective choose that the vm should use 1, 2 or 3 monitors and it is easy to switch back and forth between work and private without have any work related da…

I was thinking of doing something similar, especially since work mostly insists on running Windows. Do you use conferencing software or such from the VM? If so, how's the performance?

I started working from home around 12 years ago and have been using this setup in various incarnations. I experience zero issues related to running work from inside of a VM. I work for an MS Shop, so we are using teams.

The main issue with my setup is that VMware or Windows 11 (my host OS) can't use the GPU when rendering the UI of the VM (I'm not sure if VMware or MS is to be blamed or both) despite having a discrete GPU card installed.

The rendering of the image must all be done by the CPU, which requires a lot of RAM.

After switching to 3 x 4K monitors, the VM requires 62GB of RAM to be able to run on full screen on all monitors (63720 MB to be precise). I recall that I somehow managed to get it working while "only" using around 32GB, but it became unstable. 62GB is the sweet spot where everything runs smoothly. Haven't tried to adjust the settings in years. It was a pain to get working in the first place with 4k monitors, and since I have 256 GB installed, I just left the settings as they are.

At next motherboard upgrade I might revisit, but I think that VmWare still can't take advantages of the host GPU in this regard so I expect the RAM requirement to stay.

Some computer problems can be solved by throwing hardware at it. This is one of those. Give VMware and Windows an obscene amount of RAM, and you can have Teams running smoothly and flawlessly inside a VM on a Windows Client Host in 4K.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#115

Post by firesteelrain »

regularfry wrote: post #83
firesteelrain wrote: post #20

We have been developing code inside VMs for over 15 years at my company with various flavors of VMware on the backend and lately more moving to Azure. I assumed this was normal. We reach our VMs via VDI.

I have heard VDI described variously as "an abomination", "unusable except when you absolutely have no other option", and "don't". That might be down to the implementations in play at the time, though. I most often see this sort of thing where corporate IT can't stomach devs getting root on their own machines. It's a very specific sort of corporate dysfunction.

lol yep no root here

But, I am in an airgapped environment that is tightly regulated if you get it.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#116

Post by superb_dev »

jeswin wrote: post #43
apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #36

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 se…

> VM seems like a good way to add some protection. Yeah, but someone should try to fix this anyway. It's not a nodejs-specific problem, but it's badly needed in node. Any of the 100s of authors whose packages I depend on might have made a typo, or just been careless. Software development requires a scary level of trust. I am also increasingly moving to VMs. I want tools (such as VSCode) to run on the main machine, bu…

Have you looked into something like Qubes OS?

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#117

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

So, VSCode has remote development, which any nerd would instantly think: "oh, that just means it copies files transparently", but it doesn't.

It actually runs the code, including plugins you download from the internet. All your development tools, compilers, etc. are on the remote. And then you just have a blazing fast editor on the front end. It's really unique - you can use Tramp mode in Emacs, but it is extremely slow to copy back and forth. SSH into a remote server? let's just say 200 milliseconds lag when you're trying to input characters is not a good experience.

The highest praise I can give Visual Studio Code is that remote development felt so much like local development that I wondered why it suddenly froze. Well, it turns out it's good, but it still can't deal with a network that's down. That was obvious in retrospect, however I hadn't thought of it at the time because I had completely forgotten I was doing remote development.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#118

Post by cranium »

(Tangentially related) I had to run the desktop version of Excel to develop a quick VBA macro for a client. Problem: I've been developing on a Linux box for years and the idea of leaving my cozy dev environment for a plain Windows install gave me chills.

After failing to install Windows in a VM (thanks TPM), I found a way to run Windows apps nearly natively (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps). It works by starting a Windows docker image and streaming the application frame with RDP. As the RDP client handles the copy/paste and other niceties such as shared directories, it's way easier to integrate in my env than the other options.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#119

Post by diggan »

throw5959 wrote: post #104
apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #36

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 se…

Bun package manager (compatible with NPM) doesn't execute any code during package installation.

Except you "need" things like postinstall lifecycle hook for some things. So you add the specific package you wanna download to trustedDependencies (like you'd need to do with node-sass for example), and then we're back to it executing code after downloading, making compromises to upstream dangerous again.

A lot better than npm that lets any package run postinstall for sure, but as always there are no silver bullets.

Apparently there is also a default list of packages that are allowed to run scripts on download with Bun, FYI https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/main/src/install/default...

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#120

Post by whatevaa »

IsTom wrote: post #96
lizknope wrote: post #90

Are most companies this flexible in allowing developers to install whatever they want? > My physical machine is a 2023 MacBook Pro with M2 Pro CPU > I’m using VMWare Fusion Pro > Quite often I’ve found developers frowning up Ubuntu and preaching for folks to use NixOS, Arch, Debian or other distros. The reality for me was Ubuntu was the fastest way to get set up and now I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor desig…

There's typically a list of dependencies of a specific project as a part of it, (hopefully) handled automatically by some part of build pipeline.

Build pipelines don't have much to do with actual development. What, do you edit stuff but never build it locally?
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