Hey everyone! I'm looking for recommendations on tools or methods that help create, share, and easily switch between various development or DevOps environments. I'm particularly interested in solutions that allow for reusable, disposable, and shareable setups to address issues like onboarding new team members or avoiding the classic "works on my machine" dilemma.
I'm considering tools like Nix, Docker, Devcontainers, as well as other options like asdf, pyenv, venv, Vagrant, and custom scripts. What has worked well for you in real-world scenarios? I'd love to know about your favorite use cases, any limitations you faced, and your best practices for creating reproducible and isolated environments. Thanks in advance for your advice and stories!
3 Answers
For teams, I definitely recommend using Docker combined with Devcontainers. They make collaboration a breeze. Nix is fantastic for ensuring reproducibility across environments, and pairing it with dotfiles simplifies onboarding for new team members.
We've had great success using ArgoCD for our development process. By adding a specific label to merge requests in GitLab, we can spin up cloud environments automatically using our helm templates and CI-generated Docker images. It’s a bit of workflow magic to link frontend and backend repos too. Still working locally during pre-MR stages while we evaluate other suggestions here.
I think Nix and Nixpkgs are the best for development environments, but they can be a bit complex. Nixpkgs sometimes has multiple versions of packages, which can be tricky to manage. One alternative I found useful is Flox; it simplifies version management by maintaining an external database for packages. This has really improved the user experience.
Yeah, using Nix does come with its own set of challenges, particularly with package versions. Once you get the hang of overrides and overlays, it becomes more manageable, but I've had to write my own derivations from time to time, which is tough.