Vagrant VS asdf

Vagrant

Take a look at Vagrant! https://www.vagrantup.com/ In my admittedly limited understanding I believe it offers closer to a nix like reproducable rather than repeatable deployments.

on the off chance one hasn't been tracking it, there were several "we don't need your stinking BuSL" projects when this drama first started:

https://github.com/opentofu#why-opentofu (Terraform)

https://github.com/openbao/openbao#readme (Vault)

and I know of several attempts at Vagrant <https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/forks> but I don't believe one of them has caught traction yet

There are also some who have talked about an "open Nomad" but since I don't play in that space I can't speak to it

It sounds like you're using Nix as a sort of configuration management solution. CM just isn't worth it for managing a single desktop IMO. It triples the effort for whenever you need to add or remove a package, as you must now add that also to your nix configuration. You're supposed to be able to make that back up in time saved restoring to the next machine, but inevitably the next machine will be different enough that you'll have to edit it all anyway. In the end I just got tired of trying to manage my own machine with infrastructure as code (though in fairness I was using puppet at the time not nix).

I keep a git repository with all my dot files in it[1]. This seems to work the best. It has a Windows folder as well, and I copy that out whenever I need to set up Windows.

A lot of people like using WSL but I hate how it hogs on my memory. Hyper-V is a terrible virtualization engine for consumer-grade use cases because it can't thin provision RAM. If I need to use docker, I will spin up a small Linux VM using vagrant[3] with Virtualbox[4] and put Docker on there. Vagrant is an extremely underrated tool in my opinion, particularly in a Windows context.

I use scoop for packages. Typically I will scoop install msys2 and then pin it so that it doesn't get blown away by the next upgrade.

Then I basically do all of my development inside of msys2. I can get most things running in there without virtualization. In my case that means sbcl and roswell for common lisp, senpai for irc, and tmux and nvim for sanity. Msys2 uses the pacman package manager and this is good enough.

All In all, I set up my Windows machine affresh after a while of not using it and it took me about 3 hours. Most of that time was just getting through upgrades though, I felt like it was pretty fast.

1: https://git.sr.ht/~skin/dotfiles

2: https://www.msys2.org/

3: https://www.vagrantup.com/

4: https://www.virtualbox.org/

Tools like Docker and Vagrant can be used to allow local environments to mimic production environments.

There's an open issue [1]. A scripting interface has since been added [2], and updated [3], so there's progress.

[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518

Someone should fork and maintain Vagrant with an MPL open source license:

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/CHANGELOG.m... ?

The changelog lists both improvements and bug fixes and there's even apparently some effort to port it away from ruby: https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/internal/cl...

The main issue most people have with asdf is that it’s annoyingly slow. Not unusably so, but just enough that it’s irritating.

I identified [0] the source for much of it (sub-shells and pipes) and began a PR [1], but became bogged down with BATS testing, and then found mise / rtx, so kind of lost interest. Sorry. You can always implement these if you’d like.

[0]: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-1383...

[1]: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/pull/1441

Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

https://asdf-vm.com/

Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).

(asdf)[https://asdf-vm.com/] fully supports Python and almost any other language. I've been using it for Ruby, Python, Elixir, and other languages for years and never looked back.

Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).

There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:

I've really been enjoying asdf, which is a program that allows you to install specified versions of dev utilities as well as dynamically manage them via shims and .tool-versions files.