• direnv
• nixpkgs (with flakes enabled)
• committed flake.nix and flake.lock
• Makefile or several shell scripts in bin/ for common tasks

(explainer)

My life changed once I discovered dev containers in VS Code. Basically developing within a bootstrapped Docker container.

I use “Dev Containers” in Visual Studio Code.

• Step 1 - open the root directory of your project in Visual Studio Code
• Step 2 - say yes when prompted to launch the dev container
• Step 3 - there is no Step 3.

You do need to create various config files/etc, but it’s pretty straight forward and only needs to be done once for each project. Those config files are all kept in version control.

The dev container setup generally matches the production system pretty closely. Depending on the project that ranges from dead simple to exceedingly complex with several servers all of which are built, configured and launched automatically when you open the project. If you need to change a container you just edit the config file and run a command to rebuild all of them. It’s surprisingly fast - thanks to caching at every step to avoid rebuilding the entire environment.

There is also https://devenv.sh/ which is based on nix.

I work primarily on the JVM & the projects (personal/corporate) I work w/ can be summarised as below:

1. Building & running the repo is done on the host using an SCM (software configuration management tool) such as Gradle or SBT.
2. The external dependencies of the repo, such as Redis, are managed via adocker-compose.yml.
3. The README contains a short series of commands to do different tasks RE (1)

However one approach that I’ve always been fond of (& apply/advocate wherever I can) is to replace (3) w/ a Makefile containing a bunch of standard targets shared across all repos, eg test, integration-test. Then Makefiles are thinly customised to fit the repo’s particular repo.

This has proven to be very helpful wrt congnitive load (and also CI/CD pipelines): ALL projects, regardless of the toolchain, use the same set of commands, namely

• make test
• make integration-test
• make compose-up
• make run

In short (quoting myself here):

Don’t repeat yourself. Make Make make things happen for you!

Which programming language(s) do you have in mind? Many already have built-in support for this (Go, Rust, Nim), while others have external tools you could use (Python->Poetry). Otherwise, if you want a “fast” (easy to understand) solution, a shell-script might be a fine solution.

If you want some real power, you could use the nix package manager (as already stated by other comments). It’s easy to install, but you need to learn how to use it, and with that you can easily share dev environments.

Nix! And then you can also auto-create your CI/CD environment from Nix. They share a common source, which eliminates whole classes of problems. It’s supsr fast and very awesome when it works, but it has a learning curve. Worth the effort though.

Nix/NixOS with flakes, direnv, and lorri.

I like using vagrant and/or docker to provision the environments, when possible.

Docker compose to get started quickly. Although docker can be slow on windows so other methods are also documented.

Typically using Lando which is a frontend for docker-compose which makes it easier for the users unfamiliar with docker to use it to spin up their environments.

Well-documented bash scripts.

For my local team: Generally a container (docker) for local dev. My team uses go so sometimes a Makefile without docker is enough. For other teams i’ve mostly i see docker.

for multiple apps this can get more complicated, docker compose, or skaffold is what i generally reach for (my team is responsible for k8s clusters so skaffold is pretty natural). I’ve seen other teams use garden.

hashicorp makes something called waypoint which i’ve never used. Nix people seem to be well liked as well.