Consider a virtualized dev env for consistency

[mstade]

From @mstade on September 16, 2015 14:41

Virtualized dev environments are a huge boon to productivity, making almost any works-on-my-machine problem just go away by offering up a consistent development experience. Bonus points if this environment matches the delivery pipeline, such that there's very little work to go from local dev to CI to actual delivery.

The main requirements of such a setup is that it should work very well on Linux and Windows, as well as reasonably well on OSX.

To that end, there are a few options. There are others, no doubt, but here are some I can think of off hand, and as well have some experience with:

• Vagrant: mature software that works well across pretty much any platform under the sun. It's got good documentation, and a lot of community support in terms of articles and tutorials.
• Wercker: Interestingly enough, they have support for local development environments; making this a very strong contender as it's also usable as a full delivery pipeline whereas Vagrant and others focus solely on the local development.
• Docker Compose (previously Fig): Let's you define and run multi-container applications. Probably a bit overkill since its main focus seem to be on composing images for actual deployment. Things like watching for changes and what not would have to be built in to the application itself, as opposed to being something the tool would do for you and consequently re-run steps. Cool tool, nonetheless.

Copied from original issue: sammyt/rhumb#7

[mstade]

Docker Compose doesn't work on windows at the moment, so it's out of the picture.