The Setup
The Prelude
There are a number of ways we developers try to simplify our lives. Many of them involve adopting language-specific tools that work fine for us locally, but have almost nothing to do with the way that our code is going to eventually run in production. In my experience, this produces pain when code has to make that transition from development to production.
In some larger teams, that pain is felt by another group, so it's easy for developers to take a "not my problem" attitude. The teams I've worked with more recently are small. We feel the pain. That's a good thing, since we're incentivized to minimize it.
I wrote this in order to share a setup I've been using locally for over a year, and refining recently, with my coworkers at nVisium. I've seen bits and pieces of similar setups around the web, mostly in the form of a quick mention in a blog post or a tweet, but I've not seen a comprehensive guide to getting up and running on a current version of macOS before.
After seeing this writeup, nVisium was quick to encourage me to share it more broadly. nVisium is cool like that. We're also really awesome at helping people secure their apps, so you should probably check us out after you're done working through this guide. Or before. I can wait.
The Expectations
The Setup isn't intended to be a replacement for reading the docs or knowing how to best configure the tools it uses. It's a starting point on the path toward building an environment that more accurately represents the way our apps are served up in the real world, and hopefully helps us squash more bugs before they get the chance to affect a single user.
Once finished, your Mac will be configured to host two custom TLDs, .devel and
.staging, and you'll have a solid understanding of how to set up new apps, or
an entire SOA-style family of apps, for use with The Setup. You'll even be able
to run a suite of acceptance tests against a full application stack running in
an isolated local staging environment under Docker, if you want. And why
wouldn't you want? That sounds awesome!
The base system assumed by this guide is macOS 10.13 High Sierra, with a working install of Homebrew. While it should work for less current versions of macOS, changes in launchd may require a few tweaks to plist files.
The Outline
This guide has been broken into sections for each component involved, each with a README specific to its setup. They're interlinked in such a way as to allow navigation for step-by-step setup. Therefore, it is recommended that you clone this repository, then work from the clone while following along with the web-based copy of the documentation. Any commands, unless otherwise noted, are to be run from the directory of the component whose README you are viewing.
The components of The Setup:
Let's get started by setting up nginx.