I like where you're going. Wanted to offer some two other options to skin that particular cat, addressing at least the three motivations you identified: VMs and Containers.
If you want me to support the suggestions, let me know in a comment. Otherwise, I'll just consider it out-of-scope or beyond the intent of this post.
Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is active in the community running CFE.dev and Orlando Devs.
I prefer the VM (or container) approach because, in addition to addressing the three items you identified, it generally allows me to nail down a test environment as close to the production server as I care to make it -- without unnecessarily constraining my dev machine.
By offloading the test environment to a VM, I'm free to upgrade my dev machine through various OS/distro upgrades, without compromising the test environment integrity -- the VM continues to run CentOS 6 server, while my dev machine matures from Ubuntu 12->14->16(->18 next weekend) LTS versions.
Similar advantages may be had with containers - with the added advantage that they can also leverage shared OS for a smaller footprint if multiple servers are needed.
With later versions of apache, getting SSL up and running is as simple as linking the sites-available conf to the sites-enabled directory. The provided snakeoil certs make it a breeze.
There's a bit of a learning curve for the VMs, but its been well worth it.
Good luck and please keep blogging.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I like where you're going. Wanted to offer some two other options to skin that particular cat, addressing at least the three motivations you identified: VMs and Containers.
If you want me to support the suggestions, let me know in a comment. Otherwise, I'll just consider it out-of-scope or beyond the intent of this post.
Go for it. I barely skimmed the surface of possible solutions...just covering the use-cases that I needed for my particular work.
Sure.
I prefer the VM (or container) approach because, in addition to addressing the three items you identified, it generally allows me to nail down a test environment as close to the production server as I care to make it -- without unnecessarily constraining my dev machine.
By offloading the test environment to a VM, I'm free to upgrade my dev machine through various OS/distro upgrades, without compromising the test environment integrity -- the VM continues to run CentOS 6 server, while my dev machine matures from Ubuntu 12->14->16(->18 next weekend) LTS versions.
Similar advantages may be had with containers - with the added advantage that they can also leverage shared OS for a smaller footprint if multiple servers are needed.
With later versions of apache, getting SSL up and running is as simple as linking the sites-available conf to the sites-enabled directory. The provided snakeoil certs make it a breeze.
There's a bit of a learning curve for the VMs, but its been well worth it.
Good luck and please keep blogging.