What is the best practice on setting up development VMs?

Hello HN,

I want to set up an VM for my team. I am trying to use VirtualBox to run a local copy of production software environment on each laptop as that's what I believed to be the common practice.

However, if we try to give the env an initial data dump, it can easily boost the file size to >10G and makes setting up process very time consuming and for some machines that is even too big.

Because of that, my teammate set up a cloud-based env for himself and encouraged us to do the same. Even though it is creative and solves some problems, I am not sure if that's a good solution. Is it reliable? Is it scalable?

What will be your recommendation on setting up the Dev env?

Thank you.

2 comments

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nihar 13y ago ↗

We go the VM route as well. We have a base VM with all the applications and development tools installed, and clone it for each new developer that we on-board. We have an internal HyperV based solution for hosting the VMs and the cost works out to about 250-300 per month depending on usage, but it's worth the cost...

If you need to set up a base VM, set it up natively on a desktop / laptop and create a VM from it using VirtualBox / VMWare / Parallels ... You can then distribute this VM or host it on a VMWare server

hiphopopotamus 13y ago ↗

You could use something like a Linode virtual server as your dev env. I know a few people do that. Of course if you're doing web development you may have to deal with your dev server possibly being publicly facing.

Personally I mostly do Node.js and Python development, and I just set up an Ubuntu Server VM in VirtualBox and share a folder from the host OS. That way I can use the VM to run the code, but use editors etc on the host OS. I can set-up a VM in about 15 mins so it isn't even worth backing them up or transferring them between machines.