Local Development vs Development droplet

Question

I am used to developing on a live server and making changes directly to the production server. <–(I know not a good idea, but that’s what i have been doing for years) I want to change this using digital ocean.

I’m looking for advice on how to implement a good environment. Keep in mind, i’m not working with a lot of other developers and most are small apps and some client websites.

Many posts say to implement a local machine development environment > push to github > then deploy to live/production server.

I understand the local dev environment(mac), but i have about 4 different computers i work off of on any given day(laptop at home, Imac at work 1, different imac at work 2, and another imac at home incase I don’t want to use my laptop. My point is, I hate being tied to one machine, so local dev environment has never been good for me.

My thought was to create two droplets, one for dev and another for production, with github in the middle for version control.

My question is…does this make sense? Is there anyone else doing it this way or should I be using local dev on all of my machines?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

scott713090 · Answer

Hi bburnsworth, I would recommend that you create two droplets - 1 Production Droplet and 1 Development Droplet, The reason why I say this is: 1. I’ve seen myself when deploying applications - They will work fine in your local work/home environment on your local network but as soon as you publish to a Production Server there is an issue with some variable in the Operating System and can cause your whole production server to crash. 2. Noting that you like to jump around from machine to machine.

alexandre · Answer

I don’t know your environment scenario.I’m using PHP and MySQL for all my projects, some have frameworks, some don’t.They key is: PHP provides ‘Dependency Manager’ from Composer. So… wherever i move my application, Composer will take care of all libraries i need to run my app, install and keep everything up to date.Not just PHP, but Ruby also provide cool stuffs like that and sure other languages/platforms do so. I really never (yeah, never, never, never…) had to worry about development and productions servers. Also, i work with identical production/development environment (same specs, different servers). So, when developing I can get all possible problems, fix then in production server (install modules, change configs) and after that i get everything ready to production. Let us know more about you languages, servers and other cool stuffs :)

bburnsworth · Answer

Thanks guys.I am using php and mysql mostly on ubuntu servers…Some CMS’s for client websites and Laravel framework for applications. I’m leaning toward two identical droplets (dev & production). I have also been looking into vagrant for a local development environment as well, but given that i bounce around from machine to machine a lot, it’s probably not the best solution.

Become a contributor for community

DigitalOcean Documentation

Resources for startups and AI-native businesses

The developer cloud

Start building today

Report this

Local Development vs Development droplet

Report this

Local Development vs Development droplet