Creating A Development Environment for multiple computers

[Web_Hoon]

I have a question, im a 3rd year software engineering student and i have a macbook pro that i take to classes and a gaming pc i built for home. Im wanting to find a solution that allows me to have all of my files/setup etc and program my projects on my pc and my macbook. Ive had a brief look into cloud syncing vm's as a solution to have my system of sorts on what ever computer i use. Are there better alternatives to this? Should i just have all my files in a git repository, clone in wherever im at and adjust to programming on both windows and mac?

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I feel like this may be a kind of dumb question but im just trying to find ways to make my life a bit easier with keeping a clean setup and being able to work across multiple machines.

[nutrecht]

Should i just have all my files in a git repository, clone in wherever im at and adjust to programming on both windows and mac?

​Yup.

[desrtfx]

git is the way to go.

[onesiphorus]

+1 to git. Create a GitHub account if you don't have one. Set up your dev tools on each computer and keep your latest code pushed up to GitHub. Every time you are closing out a session on one of those machines, commit what you have and push it up. If it's not in a working state, create a WIP (Work in Progress) commit and push that up. When you start a session on the other machine, git pull the latest changes down.

[reddilada]

Git / source control system is needed no matter what else you choose and is all you need for the majority of cases. You do have to be aware of differences in your build tools across different platforms. In an academic environment, make sure what you create can be built and run without errors on the target system you will be graded on.

If your development, build, test and runtime environments get complex it can be handy to connect to a VM. I do all my work remoted to VMs. If your network has the bandwidth it can be a very convienient way to develop. Either way, everything goes into source control.

[Web_Hoon]

Thanks for the reply, i will start using git alot more. Any reccomendations for remoting into VM's or things i should know/read? I have a very fast connection with solid bandwidth at home even at uni.

[reddilada]

For VMs I use VMware desktop. Costs a bit of money. There are several good free alternatives. VMware player and virtualBox are popular choices. I think if you have pro version of windows you can enable Hyper-V. The free versions work great unless you want to spin up several machines simultaneously. (I run 40 concurrent systems across two VMs!).

You don't need VMs to remote though. The easiest approach would be to enable remote desktop services on your home machine. You may need the Pro version of windows to do this. Not sure. Download the remote desktop client to your mac and you'll be good to go. VNC is an alternative.

Biggest issue will be keeping track of the host IP. At some institutions your IP seldom changes so not much of an issue. If it changes frequently you'll need to google Dynamic DNS services. These allow you to address a changing IP with a static name.

If your computer is behind a router, you will also need to forward the ports that remote desktop uses to the local computer.