Local Development Tooling

Just a summary of the tools I’m using to manage my local development environment.

• yadm is a dotfiles manager that helps me keep my overall shell environment in sync across machines. I’m using alternates for linux support (and should be using it with hostname for a few things due to my work laptop currently being more managed than I usually deal with), encryption (SSH keys), and bootstraps for fresh setup.

• asdf is a manager for version managers. I primarily work in Ruby, but dabble all over, and it makes a lot of sense to replace rvm/rbenv, nvm, pyenv, etc with a single tool that has a consistent interface. Specifically, this is good for locking a project to a runtime version, without needing to juggle anything systemwide.

• direnv is a complement to asdf, but it manages your shell environment - I’ve only just started toying around with it, but even just layout ruby to get it to automatically isolate my gems and set up paths so I don’t need to bundle exec anything anymore is great. It also lets me set up some environment variables to get alternate debug info out of our Rails app without dirtying up my global shell.

To investigate

• devenv builds atop Nix to set up 100% reproducible local environments/dependencies.