How to automate development environment setup?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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