Nanobox: Local development done right

The aggregate HN community seems to be reacting pretty negatively, but I see a lot of value in high-level "magic" tools (like this and Otto) that abstract away configuration for developers. While everyone else commenting is likely more experienced and thus feels more comfortable setting up the required config files, I am still a relatively novice web developer. Tools such as Nanobox and Otto provide a way for people like me to start using the right dev environment management processes without being overwhelmed.

It&#x27;s a bit disingenuous to list a bunch of languages (along with custom logo icons) that are _presumably_ supported by nanobox, only to force visitors to drill-down one-by-one to discover that only one out of three have any support at all, and the others are just placeholders saying &quot;please contribute&quot;.<p>On the positive side, I guess it is better odds than a state lottery.

I am skeptical about this tool because I feel like the learning surface underneath will actually be massive, but massive in the wrong direction toward someone&#x27;s idiosyncratic product.<p>In order to give me confidence that I won&#x27;t have to look underneath the surface too much, I&#x27;d want to know that the abstraction is very airtight, but all appearances say otherwise. Like another commentator said, I&#x27;d rather have an app with well-defined boundaries.

Interesting, but this is too much of a framework for my taste. I prefer to work with independent tools with a well-defined boundary, so that I can change them at will.

While I don&#x27;t think your tool is for everyone your site design is. Love the colors and clean design, goes a long way towards making me want to understand Nanobox.

What makes it different from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ottoproject.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ottoproject.io</a> ?

And again dependency on Vagrant and Virtualbox. What can you do.<p>On every modern Ubuntu (even previous&#x2F;old LTS) Docker works out of the box, without any issue.<p>Why add another virtualization layer on top?

I have a Dockerfile that I use to run my production. This is already built.<p>Is there anything I can use to build a local dev environment quickly <i>using the Dockerfile</i>. Obviously I can use docker, but quite often new developers have trouble with docker.

Can&#x27;t see the letters, sorry. Not everyone is sitting in a dark room.

Assuming this works perfectly well, all the time — this is awesome. A possible pain-point this is addressing is that apps behave differently locally and then when you move them to the cloud (aka deploy them) they behave differently.

What&#x27;s your take on Nix&#x2F;Guix vs containers&#x2F;virtual machines for setting up development environments? (note that the former also support containers, but they provide a very systematic way to manage dependencies)

Does anyone know what the endgame for this software is? Does Nanobox plan to offer a more premium service in addition to the basic functionalities? Hashicorp makes some revenue from premium services and I cannot imagine a tool this polished being sustainable without some sort of revenue source. Just asking, not a criticism.

To save everybody some time, here is a list of the runtimes and frameworks actually supported by nanobox:<p><pre><code> - ruby 1.9, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 &#x2F; jruby 1.6, 1.7, 9.0 - node 0.8, 0.10, 0.12 &#x2F; iojs 2.3 - python 2.7, 3.4 - php 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 - wordpress (version unknown) - java openjdk 7, 8 &#x2F; sunjdk 6, 7, 8 (no minor version information available) </code></pre> The actual content on the &quot;Engines&quot; page is aspirational, to say the least. One of the first question I ask of a tech product is &quot;is it usable today for any current projects?&quot; - why make this question challenging for site visitors?<p>If they&#x27;re targeting novice web developers who should follow best practices, no rails support and out-of-date node support seems like a bad place to start.

seems interesting but I started clicking around, specifically in the Python section and this website seems to have been released too early, the text I am not sure is right(it says I need to use a ruby engine settings for python?) and some links don&#x27;t work or give 404.

I develop in OSX, Vagrant is entirely too much overhead and hurts more than it helps. It&#x27;s less work to make the app work cross-platform than to have to deal with the slowdown and the added tool complexity.

I just see a blue wall with a logo at the bottom on Edge or IE 11.

Beautiful website. Really. The colors are exquisite.

Magic engine detected Rails 4.2.5 app as nodejs...