would a dev-VM help beginners getting started
Florian Staudacher
Public
Seen by 76
If someone comes along wanting to start helping out with development I get the feeling simply setting up a dev-environment is a big obstacle by itself.
An experienced Ruby/Rails developer has no problems setting up the D* dev env, but - if I remember my early days - taking that first step might take a while; and some motivation.
Also, it might make sense to lower the barrier to a level where getting started really doesn't require any prior knowledge, so everyone can focus on what they're good at - Javascript, CSS, Ruby and what have you.
I propose to create a VM image that new devs can download and find a ready-to-go setup for running D*, including Ruby, Redis, Postgres and all the other stuff we depend on.
This would probably mean utililzing a setup tool like Puppet or Chef and a service to build the images, like packer.io.
Re-building should happen regularly and - ideally - automatically, and if we do it right, the dev team can use it themselves, to make sure everything works as expected.
Can we get a range of opinions?
jakobdee Sat 14 Jun 2014 5:37AM
... oops .... Debian *Diaspora package uses .... theres so much functionality already exists,just needs fishing out ... i believe the ratio of intermediate users and competent scripters and developers would be higher than in other social networks ... but the challenge is a shared design.
jakobdee Sat 14 Jun 2014 5:40AM
@Goob exactly ... if you dont understand VM ... then your lack of understanding of Vagrant is at the beginning of the same learning curve ;) ... if its important to their productivity,they will study :)
jakobdee Sat 14 Jun 2014 5:44AM
though Bitnami's@Daniel Lopez has already answered this ;)
Chocobozzz Fri 27 Jun 2014 8:28AM
Hi,
I think Docker would be interesting because lighter weight than virtual machines. Dev can easily change working environment in a few seconds and pod admin can easily build their own Diaspora image from a pre-configured environment.
I wrote Dockerfiles for different Diaspora configurations (nginx/apache, mysql/postgre) and built the images on docker.com for examples.
Sources : https://github.com/Chocobozzz/Diaspora-Docker
Images : https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/chocobozzz/diaspora-docker/
The main defect is the user has to run on Linux (eventually Mac).
Jason Robinson Fri 27 Jun 2014 8:29AM
Awesome @chocobozzz - will check these out!
jakobdee · Sat 14 Jun 2014 5:34AM
its a nice idea ... but i agree with @Jonne Haß ...your choice of VM regarding security considerations should be chosen carefully .... but one of the things that interests me about *Diaspora is its multi-application architecture ... theres no need for feature creep that would create more complexity ... there is ample potential in existing processes ... i think a collaborative space - maybe linked to Github ... thinking of Mosh's shared terminal or the whiteblock teaching editor that the guy from India who makes the