Loomio

would a dev-VM help beginners getting started

FS 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?

JH

Jonne Haß Wed 26 Mar 2014 7:03PM

I won't develop for diaspora in a VM.

DU

Rich Wed 26 Mar 2014 8:43PM

Developing software using VMs is a great idea, snapshots are brilliant.

It's a good idea to get people up and running quickly for sure, but don't Bitnami already offer this?

DU

Rich Wed 26 Mar 2014 8:44PM

http://bitnami.com/download/files/stacks/diaspora/0.3.0.3-0/bitnami-diaspora-0.3.0.3-0-ubuntu-12.04.zip?with_popup_skip_signin=1

Granted, it's not development as such, but I'm sure the folks at Bitnami would accommodate a request from the Foundation.

JR

Jason Robinson Thu 27 Mar 2014 7:50PM

There is also a vagrant based thingy: https://www.loomio.org/d/ZYOju0R6/automating-diaspora-deploy-with-vagrant-puppet-and-capistrano

VM's are great, I'd totally love to have a well supported solution for developers to jump right in. But someone just needs to maintain them. I'd vote for the Vagrant solution by Joe to be some kind of "officially recommended" since he seems pretty eager ;) Of course we should also maintain the install instructions as they are now.

RF

Rasmus Fuhse Tue 15 Apr 2014 1:05PM

I'd prefer a VM over vagrant. The reason to use a VM is that I don't want to handle all the different technologies that diaspora requires to be run. But vagrant would be another strange technology that people might not be used to. But everybody understands a VM.

G

goob Tue 15 Apr 2014 4:24PM

But everybody understands a VM.

ahem I'm not sure I do.

DU

Rich Tue 15 Apr 2014 6:02PM

I've reached out to our friends at Bitnami on this one :)

DL

Daniel Lopez Tue 15 Apr 2014 9:06PM

Hi, Daniel from Bitnami here. If you tell us what the VMs are missing in terms of being useful for development (not just deployment) we will be happy to look into it.

https://bitnami.com/stack/diaspora

DU

Rich Tue 22 Apr 2014 6:18PM

@daniellopez Thanks very much for getting to this one so quickly!

@EveryoneElse Are you able to supply Daniel with some more information?

M

Maciek Łoziński Fri 13 Jun 2014 7:05PM

I'm not a Diaspora developer, but since none of them replied, maybe I'll try to say about what would I expect to find inside a VM image if I was (in fact I hope I will some day become) a fresh Diaspora developer:
* a running development installation of diaspora
* git repo ready to push changes from outside of the VM (that is from my local repo, where I do all the development) to it.
* scripts to build and update/restart an application from this repo, possibliy some kind of continuous integration solution.

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