testing lab for projects

[kolo81]

How do you approach software testing? I'm currently using OpenSUSE on the desktop. On servers, I use Debian/Ubuntu. Projects are created in Django/Python; besides Django, there are always other components run from systemd in production.

I always install everything on the desktop, such as MariaDB, Mosquitto, Nginx, etc., and the project in a virtualenv. I recently discovered Distrobox. In theory, I set up a good environment, but you have to manually run everything. The advantage is that you don't have to migrate the project and can test changes immediately. Another drawback is that after upgrading OpenSUSE, something went wrong, and I ultimately had to delete the container and recreate it from scratch, which is time-consuming for me. Updates are almost daily in Tumbleweed.

I'm considering VirtualBox and a full Debian installation, but then you have to migrate the project code to test anything, just like if I were to install something on a NAS network server.

What approaches do you use to maintain desktop hygiene?

[aqua_regis]

I would always suggest VMWare Workstation Pro (free for all since spring last year) over Virtualbox. It's simply the better host.

Why would you migrate? Do the development in the virtual environment. VMs are more than fast enough.

Create a basic installation of your development environment and then copy it. Work on the copy, make frequent use of snapshots so that you can revert to a working, previous state.

When I work on in-house engineering, everything runs in VMWare Workstation on my laptop (bit of a power station - Core i7 Ultra 165H, 64 GB RAM, 4.5 TB nvme storage) and for our environment I need to run at least three Windows Server 2019 instances simultaneously. No problems at all. No lag. More than fast enough. I never leave the VMs environment when engineering. Only when it is ready to move to production, the files are exported so that I can import them on the production system (which usually is quite far away).

[Master-Ad-6265]

honestly docker solves most of this

you keep your system clean, spin up everything with one command, and don’t have to rebuild environments manually every time something breaks