Ask HN: Save developer time by automating setup?

Re:Ask HN: Save developer time by automating setup? by bdon on Monday July 22, 2013 @04:40AM (#6082544)

I see a few reasons why this problem has been hard to crack:

1. A week or so of struggling to get a new box set up is acceptable if you're prepared to use it for at least a few months

2. Developers are very particular about environment choices, example: choosing between rbenv, rvm, chruby

3. Mac OS X and Windows developers lag behind in solid package managers, and virtualized dev environments have little (albeit growing) mindshare

I think the right solution will look something like containers/VMs via tools like Docker/Vagrant combined with configuration management tools like Chef/Puppet/Salt/Ansible. Configuration management hasn't taken off though yet among developers and is still mostly perceived as a sysadmin skillset.

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Re:Ask HN: Save developer time by automating setup? by xcbnxcbxmcb on Monday July 22, 2013 @11:21PM (#6088043)

I'm new to Vagrant and Chef but a quick walk through the docs and your idea of container + config management sounds extremely powerful! Chef even has recipes to setup applications and combining that with a PaaS/IaaS should automate all machines.

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