On 23 Mar 2011, at 16:26, Jon Jensen wrote:

> On Mar 23, 2011, at 4:17 PM, Wade Preston Shearer wrote:
> 
>> What is the benefit of having your development environment be local instead 
>> of remote? I can think of several cons. The only pro I can think of is that 
>> you don't have to have an internet connection. 
> 
> 1. you don't need an internet connection
> 2. it's (hopefully) faster because it's local

I've been working this way for years and years and connection speed has never 
been an issue.


> 3. by definition, it's truly sandboxed (i.e. other devs can't screw it up). a 
> shared dev environment can be a whole bag of hurt

Each dev only has access to his home directory on the server—you can't screw 
another dev's sandbox up. I guess an infinite loop or something could bring the 
server to it's knees, but it's otherwise sandboxed.


> 4. if you're using git, this is a no-brainer and makes life much easier. 
> everything is local, you can easily work on different branches at the same 
> time, etc.

You can branch and spin up as many instances on a remote server as you could on 
a local machine.


> Plus if you've solved the whole 
> getting-a-dev-environment-set-up-anywhere-quickly problem, it becomes super 
> easy to spin up new ones and have more than one (e.g. you have your stable 
> branch and want to see how it interacts with a dev branch, so you need one of 
> each side-by-side).

You can do this same thing on a remote machine.


We have our dev server set up with wildcard subdomains, so each developer gets 
a URL automatically with his linux user account…

*.user.dev.example.com


In his home dir, he creates a sites folder and anything he puts in there 
automatically works as a web root, like…

/home/user/sites/cow/htdocs/index.html


…as…

http://cow.user.dev.example.com/index.html


This allows each dev to be working on an unlimited number of sites, projects, 
and/or branches in his area.

I'm not trying to say that local dev is bad by any means. To each his own. I'm 
just saying that for me, this works really well. It's especially nice for my 
team as I don't have to worry about each dev updating his local machine 
(updates, patches, config, etc) each time we change or upgrade something 
architecturally.

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