Out of curiosity, how many dev environments do folks use? Is this for reproducible environments shared by members of a team or company?<p>For a single user with one development machine, simply having say a time-machine backup could be sufficient. I haven't had challenges for personal projects where details mattered. e.g. a Maven pom.xml, or Go modules/packages was sufficient for my needs.<p>Historically I'd only cared about automating the spec of production environments. Why would I want/need this?<p>I now recollect once being contacted out of the blue as being a person who might be able diagnose/solve an issue at a company I'd never worked with. They had two dev machines and only one of them could produce a working program. Their team couldn't figure it out. I gave them a rate and arrived on-site. It was a Visual Basic 6 program, so I just took two half days going through every EXE & DLL related to Windows and VB, eventually finding the difference. Tedious but not rocket science. Is it to avoid these cases?<p><i>Edit: We have project onboarding instructions where I work. I suppose it could be useful for making those. I don't make them but could appreciate if they used a standard rather than bespoke scheme.</i>