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Developing inside a virtual machine

blog.disintegrator.dev

141–147 of 147 posts

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes that's right, the process is: - clone the repo with git - Open Cursor (or vscode) locally, click "open remote window" little blue button at the bottom left of the screen - Navigate to the folder you cloned and press open - IDE will recognise that there's a .devcontainer inside the folder and pop a dialog saying "Re-open in container", click that. If this dialog doesn't show press "Shift+Ctrl+P" and type "Rebuild"…

Great thanks for the info, this is along the lines I was thinking. I'm guessing that means you also have dedicated user accounts on the shared host for each developer? I suppose that would be pretty easy to manage with some ansible.

I've always liked the devcontainer approach, and in particular github codespace. But I've wanted to run it on hardware we can buy and manage. This approach sounds like it gets you 95% of the process, just missing a bit of the convenience around env per branch like codespaces can do. But that's hardly a problem really.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#142
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I should have written "build process" instead I suppose.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#143
An alternative approach we're working on is Daytona (https://github.com/daytonaio/daytona) - it orchestrates dev environments on your infrastructure or even on your local machine. Oh, and it is Apache 2.0. The interesting bit is how it handles any IDE integration and various providers for running your dev envs on.

Disclosure: I work on this project

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#144
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a government agency that used Zscaler to perform TLS MITM inspection. You have to create a tunnel to a Zcaler datacenter and send all your traffic to them encrypted with a certificate they provide so they can decrypt it. Then they encrypt it again and send it on its way. It can detect things that otherwise could not but you are putting a LOT of trust into Zscaler security because anyone who hacks them can…

You'd think last year's Clownstrike incident would put the lie to the efficacy of the fucking-for-virginity approach to endpoint security favored by organizations but no. At the enterprise level, security isn't really about security, it's about having an audit trail so bad actors can be caught after the fact.

It is like hiring bodyguards. Bodyguards could kill the person they are protecting at any time BUT they have an economic and legal incentive to not do so and so you bet that the odds of being killed by bodyguards is far lower than by some random stalker.

Like wise giving Crowdstrike root access to everything is a bet that you will on the whole be more secure than if you didn't and for most companies I believe this is true. But if you are Google or AWS you are going to be able to do better than Crowdstrike.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#147
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Complete pain in the butt for anything else like qemu

It's pretty manageable with libvirt + virt-manager sitting on top of QEMU, though.
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