I'm assuming Mitchell hasn't seen this yet, but I'm sure I speak for both of us when I say thank you for including Vagrant in your post.
I would like to point out a few things.
1. Another thing to set up.
Streamlining project setup is one of Vagrant's primary goals. Instead of putting someone, who potentially has no background with the app, through a 20 step process installing all the application dependencies you can simply tell them to run a few commands.
2. It's a "Ruby tool".
While I don't think your intention was to pigeon hole it, Vagrant is really meant for any development environment/language/setup. Its just unfortunate that the only supported provisioning tool uses Ruby for its DSL (are there similar tools in other languages?)
(NOTE: its been a while since I contributed meaningfully to the project)
Yes! Yes Yes Yes! Virtualization for development is extremely important and I'm glad you wrote this. Also, thanks for the hat tip to Vagrant, I appreciate it. I've given a few talks on this and it always amazes me how many people are so comfortable with the status quo of developing on their own machines with apache/mysql/etc installed directly on their machines. Its a disaster waiting to happen.
I want to point out to the many people using VMWare out there: VMWare Fusion is great, yes, I won't argue. Their shared folders are better, again I agree. But Vagrant does make use of NFS which is faster than even VMWare Fusion's shared folders in order to get around VirtualBox's terrible performance.
And just because I have things to say, here are a few of my own remarks against the arguments against virtualization of development:
* Speed - Given enough RAM (which for a standard web application, shouldn't be any more than 512 MB to 1 GB for the VM instance), the speed difference is noticeable but not detrimental to your productivity. For regular web requests you won't notice any speed difference. For CPU intensive background tasks, you'll probably see a 1.5x slowdown. Again, unless you're running 5 hour tasks during development, it shouldn't be a big deal, and the benefits outweigh these issues, in my opinion.
* Lower level than you're used to - Then get your friendly sysadmin to setup a base image to use for your site. A modern sysadmin has many scripts made to automate the setup of the environment for production. There is no reason these scripts can't be used to setup your development as well. Use it! Stay in your happy place and just boot up a VM and code! (Although its my opinion every developer should take the time to learn their software stack top to bottom)
* Something else to setup - Once. You only need to learn it once, and its repeatable and dependable. I would argue that setting up a new software stack every time a dependency changes on your web app is far more than one more "something else to setup."
* Developer workstations should be personal - Right! I agree 100%. So stop installing server crap on your personal computers. Keep your Twitter clients away from your web servers. Use a VM and keep your workstation personal.
I'll change the Ruby tool bit. I mentioned elsewhere in the post that it's a great tool whichever language you're using.
Regarding tools other than Chef for provisioning, while there is a Python clone somewhere Chef will very likely have the ability to use other languages for recipes very soon. I've seen at least Java and Python mentioned.
Comments
I'm assuming Mitchell hasn't seen this yet, but I'm sure I speak for both of us when I say thank you for including Vagrant in your post.
I would like to point out a few things.
1. Another thing to set up.
Streamlining project setup is one of Vagrant's primary goals. Instead of putting someone, who potentially has no background with the app, through a 20 step process installing all the application dependencies you can simply tell them to run a few commands.
2. It's a "Ruby tool".
While I don't think your intention was to pigeon hole it, Vagrant is really meant for any development environment/language/setup. Its just unfortunate that the only supported provisioning tool uses Ruby for its DSL (are there similar tools in other languages?)
(NOTE: its been a while since I contributed meaningfully to the project)
I did finally see this entry. It was a great read and I agree completely with it. Note that I posted my comment on the blog directly: http://morethanseven.net/2010/11/04/Why-you-should-be-using-...
Since clicking on that just to read my comment can be annoying, I've copied it below as well:
=========================================================
Yes! Yes Yes Yes! Virtualization for development is extremely important and I'm glad you wrote this. Also, thanks for the hat tip to Vagrant, I appreciate it. I've given a few talks on this and it always amazes me how many people are so comfortable with the status quo of developing on their own machines with apache/mysql/etc installed directly on their machines. Its a disaster waiting to happen.
I want to point out to the many people using VMWare out there: VMWare Fusion is great, yes, I won't argue. Their shared folders are better, again I agree. But Vagrant does make use of NFS which is faster than even VMWare Fusion's shared folders in order to get around VirtualBox's terrible performance.
And just because I have things to say, here are a few of my own remarks against the arguments against virtualization of development:
* Speed - Given enough RAM (which for a standard web application, shouldn't be any more than 512 MB to 1 GB for the VM instance), the speed difference is noticeable but not detrimental to your productivity. For regular web requests you won't notice any speed difference. For CPU intensive background tasks, you'll probably see a 1.5x slowdown. Again, unless you're running 5 hour tasks during development, it shouldn't be a big deal, and the benefits outweigh these issues, in my opinion.
* Lower level than you're used to - Then get your friendly sysadmin to setup a base image to use for your site. A modern sysadmin has many scripts made to automate the setup of the environment for production. There is no reason these scripts can't be used to setup your development as well. Use it! Stay in your happy place and just boot up a VM and code! (Although its my opinion every developer should take the time to learn their software stack top to bottom)
* Something else to setup - Once. You only need to learn it once, and its repeatable and dependable. I would argue that setting up a new software stack every time a dependency changes on your web app is far more than one more "something else to setup."
* Developer workstations should be personal - Right! I agree 100%. So stop installing server crap on your personal computers. Keep your Twitter clients away from your web servers. Use a VM and keep your workstation personal.
Thanks again, Mitchell
I'll change the Ruby tool bit. I mentioned elsewhere in the post that it's a great tool whichever language you're using.
Regarding tools other than Chef for provisioning, while there is a Python clone somewhere Chef will very likely have the ability to use other languages for recipes very soon. I've seen at least Java and Python mentioned.