How to automate development environment setup? [closed]

Every time a new developer joins the team or the computer a developer is using changes, the developer needs to do lots of work to setup the local development environment to make the current project work. As a SCRUM team we are trying to automate everything including deployment and tests so what I am asking is: is there a tool or a practice to make local development environment setup automated?

For example to setup my environment, first I had to install eclipse, then SVN, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP. After that I populated the DB and I had to do minor changes in the various configuration files etc... Is there a way to reduce this labor to one-click?

There are several options, and sometimes a combination of these is useful:

• automated installation
• disk imaging
• virtualization
• source code control

Details on the various options:

1. Automated Installation Tools for automating installation and configuration of a workstation's various services, tools and config files:

   • Puppet has a learning curve but is powerful. You define classes of machines (development box, web server, etc.) and it then does what is necessary to install, configure, and keep the box in the proper state. You asked for one-click, but Puppet by default is zero-click, as it checks your machine periodically to make sure it is still configured as desired. It will detect when a file or mode has been changed, and fix the problem. I currently use this to maintain a handful of RedHat Linux boxes, though it's capable of handling thousands. (Does not support Windows as of 2009-05-08).
   • Cfengine is another one. I've seen this used successfully at a shop with 70 engineers using RedHat Linux. Its limitations were part of the reason for Puppet.
   • SmartFrog is another tool for configuring hosts. It does support Windows.
   • Shell scripts. RightScale has examples of how to configure an Amazon EC2 image using shell scripts.
   • Install packages. On a Unix box it's possible to do this entirely with packages, and on Windows msi may be an option. For example, RubyWorks provides you with a full Ruby on Rails stack, all by installing one package that in turn installs other packages via dependencies.

2. Disk Images Then of course there are also disk imaging tools for storing an image of a configured host such that it can be restored to another host. As with virtualization, this is especially nice for test boxes, since it's easy to restore things to a clean slate. Keeping things continuously up-to-date is still an issue--is it worth making new images just to propagate a configuration file change?

3. Virtualization is another option, for example making copies of a Xen, VirtualPC, or VMWare image to create new hosts. This is especially useful with test boxes, as no matter what mess a test creates, you can easily restore to a clean, known state. As with disk imaging tools, keeping hosts up-to-date requires more manual steps and vigilance than if an automated install/config tool is used.

4. Source Code Control Once you've got the necessary tools installed/configured, then doing builds should be a matter of checking out what's needed from a source code repository and building it.

Currently I use a combination of the above to automate the process as follows:

• Start with a barebones OS install on a VMWare guest
• Run a shell script to install Puppet and retrieve its configs from source code control
• Puppet to install tools/components/configs
• Check out files from source code control to build and deploy our web application

I stumbled across this question and was very suprised that no one has mentioned Vagrant yet.

As Pete TerMaat and others have mentioned, virtualization is a great way to manage and automate development environments. Vagrant basically takes the pain away from setting up these virtual boxes.

Within minutes you can have a completely fresh copy of your favourite Linux distro up and running, and provisioned exactly the same way your production server is.

No more fighting with OSX or Windows to get PHP, MySQL, etc. installed. All software lives and runs inside the virtual machine. You can even SSH in with vagrant ssh. If you make a mistake or break something, just vagrant destroy it, and vagrant up to start over fresh.

Vagrant automatically creates a synced folder to your local file system, meaning you don't need to develop within the virtual machine (ie. using Vim). Use whatever your editor of choice is.

I now create a new "Vagrant box" for almost every project I do. All my settings are saved into the project repository, so it's easy to bring on another team member. They simply have to pull the repo, and run vagrant up, and they are literally ready to go.

This also makes it much easier to handle projects that have different software requirements. Maybe you have some projects that rely on PHP 5.3, but some newer ones that run PHP 5.4. Just install the version you want for that project.

Check it out!

One important point is to set up your projects in source control such that you can immediately build, deploy and run after checkout.

That means you should also checkin helper infrastructure, such as Makefiles, ant buildfiles etc., and settings for the tools, such as IDE project files.

That should take care of the setup hassle for individual projects.

For the basic machine setup, you could use a standard image. Another option is to use your platform's tools to automate installation. Under Linux, you could create a meta-package that depends on all the packages you need. Under Windows, a similar thing should be possible using MSI or the like.

Edit:

Ideally, instead of checking in helper infrastructure, you check in the information that allows the build to generate the helper infrastructure. This is the approach taken by e.g. the GNU build system (autotools etc.), or by Maven. This is even more elegant, because you can (theoretically) generate infrastructure for any (supported) build environment, thus you are not bound to e.g. one specific IDE, and settings in the helper infrastructure (paths etc.) don't need to duplicate the main project settings.

However, this also a more complex approach, so if you can't get it to work, I believe checking in stuff like IDE files directly is acceptable.

I like to use Virtual PC or VMware to virtualize the development environment. This provides a standard "dev environment" that could be shared among developers. You don't have to worry about software that the user could add to their system that may conflict with your development environment. It also provides me a way to work to two projects where the development environments can't both be on one system (using two different versions of a core technology).

Use puppet to configure both your development and production environment. Using a top-notch automation system is the only way to scale your ops.