First Week in China: Build a new Dev Environment

I see my role as enabling others. When I was a pure awesome DBA in the early 2000s I enabled developers and customers of a companies product by making mySQL fault-tolerant and fast. As I moved up the stack as an Architect while still holding onto my roots as a DBA-I kept my DBA discipline by enabling my team and company through all the knowledge I garnered.

The first thing I identified in China that can really help my team-members is making a new development environment. The reason, the production and dev environments are wildly different. Dev is on Windows while production runs various flavors of Linux's 2.6 Kernel-mostly Centos-6. Additionally when the code is ready to be push to what I like to call pre-integration servers-meaning the code is not checked in but copied to a test server then checked in if the tests past. As a result developers spend time organizing which test server to use and this server can only be used while in the office.

Generally as a developer you should develop in something simular to your production environment, and the integration server should serve as QA of the product and not as the post development process that by-passes all unit tests (which did not exist).  Also a lot of effort was put into making this Windows to Linux environment to work-just good enough-which really is not. Since PHP behaves slightly differently under Windows, I found that time was being spent on issues that could possibly not show up on Linux's php version. Thus these issues provided enough justification to build an integrated environment, where the end developer can work from home, or from where ever even if  there is no direct network connection to the outside world.

The Setup

Forcing a developer to change their OS of choice, or IDE or what have you is not going to fly in any country-its just too disruptive. Thus I chose to build the environment on virtualbox, a free VM that works on MAC and Windows, the two primary Dev environments. I pre-built the VM and uploaded it to the local fileserver. Now all the team has to do is download the VM.

Here is what is installed on the VM. (These steps follow after installing Centos-6-minimal)

First, I set up a shared directory from the HOST (Mac) machine to the GUEST machine (VM), which contains the code to run the site. This allows the user to use their favorite native IDE app or vim.

Next,  I set up a host virtual network, so even if the HOST does not have a connection to the net, it can always talk to the VM via ssh, httpd or what have you.  I also setup another network interface for the VM to talk to the outside world via the NAT setting so packages can be installed directly on it via yum.

Then I configured the yum repos for Centos-6 epel for core linux utils, 10gen for mongoDB, percona for XtraDB by modifying /etc/yum.repos.d and adding the following repos to my list

Percona.repo

epel-testing.repo

epel.repo

remi.repo

CentOS-Vault.repo

CentOS-Media.repo

CentOS-Debuginfo.repo

CentOS-Base.repo

10gen.repo 

Additionally I installed Percona, MongoDB, php, php-cli, php-frm, nginx, apache, vim-enhanced, etc. via Yum on the VM.

Finally I wrote documentation for the whole process and tested on a few people who have good Spoken English skills. With their feedback the documentation was improved and sent to the rest of the team, who have pretty good written english skills.

Now all the dev team members have to do is download the vm, configured the shared code directory and tada the entire dev environment in a box!

The next step is to resolve Schema Changes, and use Chef to update configurations and packages as if the VM was a real server-this is currently an manual process.


Next Post: Refactor PHP Models and add Unit Tests