I've recently employed a docker-based strategy for this. I work for multiple clients, some of whom go months between giving me work. Each client has their own

I've recently employed a docker-based strategy for this. I work for multiple clients, some of whom go months between giving me work. Each client has their own docker-compose setup on my machine - and I have a secondary machine that I rsync the dockerfiles and some supporting scripts[1] over to for out-and-about. I have a couple of scripts for generating the docker templates for new projects. This means I only need to manually set up three things on a new machine: Docker, a password manager, and a text editor (I'm using Atom, but Vimmers / Emaxions could probably roll this into the template generator) Depending on how locked-down your setup is, you might find that as time goes on and distros go out of support, you need to update your dockerfiles - but I think you'd need to make those kinds of tweaks with any system. Note that I no longer advocate a dockerfile per-project, but per-client (or some other sub-structure) - that way, production dockerfiles don't interfere with developer dockerfiles. Some day, I'd like to experiment with "sidecar" containers instead... some serious advantages there. [1] Supporting scripts include the templates, a few bash aliases, an easy way to find the ip of a docker machine, an easy way to open a bash shell within a docker container, etc.