Motions re: Vagrant and an earlier post on nix absolutely seconded. If you practice good "environmental hygiene", you can run dev setups on "bare metal" OS X j

Motions re: Vagrant and an earlier post on nix absolutely seconded. If you practice good "environmental hygiene", you can run dev setups on "bare metal" OS X just fine. This can be a but of a hassle to make 100% repeatable, but it can be done. In my experience, it's far preferable to work with an isolated and repeatable process whenever possible. I really love Vagrant for this, since it scales from simple inline shell scripts to setup a VM, up to integration with your favorite flavor of provisioning software (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.). I've setup environments that ran common provisioning toolchains that scaled from individual dev setups straight to production clusters. Similar motives drive a number of other approaches, esp. container-based systems like Docker. Once you're fluent in these kinds of tools, you never really want to go back...