6 replies to this topic

[mikecook]

Hi all, nice place you have here :)

I was hoping I could get your thoughts on the usefulness of setting up a dedicated home development server.

Although not a pro (by any stretch) I have been building web sites since the late 90's and dabbled in PHP. Then about 3 years ago I started learning and developing much more in Perl, RegEx and PHP, now I'm just starting on Ruby/RoR and have even started studying programming; I really like those concepts of being pragmatic, DRY and agile (yes, I've also been learning the buzz words).

In essence, I'm doing more and more coding and I think things will continue this way now.

Currently I have my PC box running Windows and have all the XAMPP, Ruby, SVN, and so on installed here, but this is also my home computer for doing day-to-day stuff. So I'm wondering if perhaps I should be considering setting up a development server or do you think for a lone part-timer it's just not worth it?

I don't have a clear grasp of the benefits/pitfalls and would really appreciate hearing your thoughts on why this is or is not a good idea.

Cheers,
Mike


P.S. Just for information, I do naturally have a couple of webhost accounts--a managed VPS and one shared.

P.P.S. I came across this little thing called an Excito B3 - I'm not sure if it's powerful enough to run Rails, etc, but its physical and electrical footprint is very small. If anyone has experience with this it'd be great to hear your thoughts on it.

[Alexander]

Welcome to these forums! For creating a dev environment at home I tend to run a LAMP stack on an OS very similar to the one of my online server (I do day to day tasks on that OS anyway). I have the advantages that I can easily switch between PHP/Apache revisions with few commands to test what I need, knowing it has the same pitfalls and compatibility of "run of the mill" server distro setups.

If you are working with many a versions or setups, a "dev box" can be a great option to learn from, even remote maintainance/SSH/networking while you're at it but if you say that you are just learning part time then your VPS is already an acceptable option, Apache supports PERL, Ruby and alike or if you want to install another server system for Ruby it is straightforward, and you negate home electrical costs completely (VPS warehouses are generally very acceptable in means of green energy).

From what you had said I just do not quite see too much the need for another system just yet.

[mikecook]

Thanks for the welcome NullwOrm, and your thoughts. I'm certainly not expecting to have to run lots of different setups as most of what I do gets pushed to the VPS/shared hosts (which are always standard cPanel), or are for internal use and stay on my own computer, so maybe I am jumping ahead of myself a little.

[WingedPanther]

I like using computers for three things: development, gaming, and surfing. XAMPP is especially nice for a dev server, because you can turn the whole thing off :)

[Alexander]

WingedPanther said:

XAMPP is especially nice for a dev server, because you can turn the whole thing off :)

Agreed, I don't know how many times I had run an infinite loop or something crazy accidentally. Better to eat your own resources than bug the vps.

[mikecook]

Nullw0rm said:

Better to eat your own resources than bug the vps.

Yup :)

Plus, I don't like the idea of dealing with all that lag if I were to use my VPS as a dev server.

I do currently have XAMPP setup and have also been messing around with Cygwin, Console, and a number of other utils (since reading The Productive Programmer [O'Reilly] -- great book!) but I'm just feeling that my home pc is becoming a bit of a mess with all this dev stuff installed too--as someone who's office desk has nothing but the computer and a phone on it, you can imagine how that makes me feel :P

[Alexander]

Create drive E:\ or something for the purpose? You can keep your other drive relatively spotless, you can install WAMP and others in the drive as well so it isn't in C:\

But buying an old cheap dev box forces you to code efficient code, so that's always a plus too :)