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I think that advice flies in the face of best practices. 1. Your dev box isn't supposed to be very similar to production, this is why you have staging servers.

I think that advice flies in the face of best practices. 1. Your dev box isn't supposed to be very similar to production, this is why you have staging servers. My dev boxes have weird tooling and debug tools. They also run all services on a single box rather than distributed. Don't pretend dev is at all like prod, this assumption will disappoint you. 2. App servers, which generally speak HTTP and use a standard interface (in ruby Rack, in Python WSGI) and speak HTTP to a load balancer (probably nginx). Are simple and just work. They're less pain than setting up apache. `cd myproject && rails server` is nice. 3. There are about 10 billion things you can get wrong with setting up a production server. If you can't figure out how to proxy requests to an app server you have no business setting up a server in the first place. You've probably already lost.

calloc 16y ago
I have to say that php-fpm does FCGI very nicely and works well with Lighttpd and Apache (even on the same host). It basically sets up a separate instance that runs PHP and requests are shuttled to the backend. Unfortunately there is no way to talk to it directly like there would be with rails and django's built in Python servers.
seldo 16y ago
1. My dev system is a series of VMs that mirror that same box deployments we have in production, the only difference being that systems we duplicate for redundancy in production are singular in dev. I've found that this prevents accidental dependencies between libraries and processes that would otherwise complicate deployments and scaling. 2. For me, "apt-get install apache" once is much simpler and cleaner than running a dev server every single time, but I have been doing it this way for more than a decade, so perhaps you are right and I am just set in my ways. 3. If you can't set up a production environment you can't set up a production environment, and it doesn't matter which architecture is involved.
indeyets 16y ago
for #2 see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283301 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283301

calloc 16y ago

I have to say that php-fpm does FCGI very nicely and works well with Lighttpd and Apache (even on the same host). It basically sets up a separate instance that runs PHP and requests are shuttled to the backend. Unfortunately there is no way to talk to it directly like there would be with rails and django's built in Python servers.

seldo 16y ago

1. My dev system is a series of VMs that mirror that same box deployments we have in production, the only difference being that systems we duplicate for redundancy in production are singular in dev. I've found that this prevents accidental dependencies between libraries and processes that would otherwise complicate deployments and scaling. 2. For me, "apt-get install apache" once is much simpler and cleaner than running a dev server every single time, but I have been doing it this way for more than a decade, so perhaps you are right and I am just set in my ways. 3. If you can't set up a production environment you can't set up a production environment, and it doesn't matter which architecture is involved.

indeyets 16y ago

for #2 see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283301 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283301