Development What?

In software development we always have dependencies that needs to be set up, whether it’s directly part of the stack you are working on or an underlying dependency.

You need an Apache2 and MySQL server here, an NGINX and PostgreSQL server there… Soon enough you computer is running a bazillion things concurrently and if you are lucky it will just take some resources but sooner or later apache will try to listen on the same port as NGINX or any other collision.

Sure you could totally be sure nothing starts automatically and start it when needs be but then you will need a PHP5 here and PHP7 there… now it gets a more annoying to solve.

Let’s see what have been commonly used solutions.

Juggling Manually

As mentioned above, you can try to isolate all your stacks and ensure they don’t bind on the same ports. This means not using a globally installed bin of your app. No apt-get install for you! I see most of your ran away to the next section already, I will also add that this is not the nicest way to share development environments.

If you ever have a need to do this, for example setting up 2 XAMP stack side by side without having them collide I’d strongly advise to look at the Bitnami Infrastructure Stacks that provide very nice installers to achieve that.

Self Contained, the lucky few

There are a lucky few that are mostly self contained already, mostly javascript based that aren’t too picky on their version.

With a globally installed NodeJS / NPM / grunt a developer can survive and handle a bunch of projects, but that does require you to work on those stacks although sooner or later someone in the team will get the brand new NodeJS that breaks it all.

Another noticeable technology that won’t trouble you much are platform specific development that already support targeting different version like .NET, Java with Android, iOS… If you are in that case, you might not appreciate how much those tools do for you.

Virtualization

One direct logic thought is Virtualization with tools like VirtualBox, VMware or HyperV. This is a very neat approach in many ways, you have one Virtual Machine (VM) for each stack, you are free to set up everything you need on it and it won’t impact any other stack. Although it’s an old solution, it’s still one of the most used solution.

Configuring the VM

A common problem is to actually get the environment up, including the VM configuration (shared folders, forwarded ports, allocated ram). It’s definitely OK to do it once, but you definitely want to do it manually every time you start a new project and/or for every team member.

Vagrant and its successor Otto are amazing tool that will let you set up a configuration file (Vagrantfile) in the root of your project with all the information needed to set up your box like the VM config or the OS.

You set it up once and then all you will have to do is a vagrant up. The first time it will download a base box of your choice that will then be reused across project.

While Vagrant supports basic provisioning, it’s harder to use it with a more complicated flow so plenty tools can come to the rescue.

Ansible, Chef, Salt and Puppet are all nice tools originally created to help set up and maintain large number of servers. All can be used for smaller orchestration scenario like setting up your VM with the right tools. I personally very much enjoyed Ansible as it’s fairly simple and is natively compatible with probably all the tools you might need.

Note: Windows isn’t supported as the control machine with Ansible.

Pros

• Allows you to run Windows env in Linux and vice-versa
• Easy to scale
• VirtualBox, Vagrant and Ansible are all free tools
• VM are totally independent from each other, no collision between stacks
• Find or Make your own base box with your stack already set up

Cons

• VM consume a lot of resources, beef up your ram and disk space (especially noticeable if you are dealing with micro-services)
• The provisioning (all the apt-get for example) will happen for each team member or new project. Consider an apt cache within your network if you expect heavy traffic because of that.
• Share folders are slow, very slow. Reading and writing in a share folder are not as efficient as a native file system, if you want more details on that I’d recommend Mitchell Hashimoto comparison on VM filesystem performances.
• Boot time, you will need to wait for the VM to start each time, not a major issue though.

Containers

You haven’t been on the internet in the last 2 years if you haven’t heard anything about Containers or the most famous tool of the market: Docker.

While I’m not here to discuss why comparing a container to a VM is dangerous, I can still compare those as development environment tools.

Docker offers operating-system-level virtualization, which solve the issues mentioned in the VM part.

Pros

• No extra resources, docker itself usage is minimal
• Native filesystem, no slow down anywhere
• Make or find your own docker image with what you need
• No boot time
• Very active community, you will find countless docker images in docker hub.

Cons

• Docker won’t get you cross-platform, if you are on Unix, you will have to run Unix-based container (doesn’t have to be the same version or distribution).
• Docker is mainly a Linux tool, Docker for Windows is based on VMs as well
• Docker requires a 64-bit installation regardless of your Ubuntu version. Additionally, your kernel must be 3.10 at minimum. The latest 3.10 minor version or a newer maintained version are also acceptable.

Note: Vagrant supports docker as well!

SaaS IDE

This a little special category, as it’s based on the previous solution but provided as a SaaS.

There have been quite a few nice tools on the market in the past years, the most noticeable for me are Cloud9 IDE and Eclipse Che.

Those gets you your environment in the cloud, already isolated.

Pros

• Native experience
• No setup trouble
• No resource trouble
• Can code as long as you have internet and a web browser.

Cons

• You won’t get far without an internet connection
• You rely on a 3rd party or need to deploy it yourself
• The same IDE, for everybody (although you could definitely use vim too)

Conclusion

We’ve seen quite a few tools I used along the way and there is definitely not unique answer. Docker on Unix based environment haad the best result for me, vagrant and Ansible are my go-to for Windows/OSx Machines. Feel free to have a look at my Symfony backend boilerplate showing both the Vagrant-Ansible combo and the Docker environment.

What are the tools that you use to save your time when setting up development environment?

---

• ← Next Post
• Previous Post →

Posted with : Linux , Docker , Vagrant , Windows

blog comments powered by Disqus