I hate setting up my dev environment.

I've published a piece on this matter. TL;DR is that dev environments should be described in code and continuously for every task be recreated from that.

dev.to/svenefftinge/continuous-dev...

This is why my entire development environment is containerized: github.com/AGhost-7/docker-dev

I love setting up a new environment, doing it on a semi regular basis forces me to keep things clean. I got a new MacBook Pro for work recently, from opening the box to being back up at close to 100% productivity was < 1 hour with no backup restored.

I find it's a problem because it's done so infrequently that it feels like you're doing it for the first time each time. I've taken notes for my latest dev setup but I expect things will have changed the next time I have to do it and my notes will be worthless.

I tend to go for a minimalist setup for avoid issues. I've seen other developers describe their setup and I can't help but think "do you really need all this stuff?". I set up pycharm, virtual envs, homebrew and am building up a .bash_profile with what i want in it, that's all. A fair chunk of it is automated and kept as a script in a private repo of mine and hopefully it's a single command to set up most of it.

Having a repository from which to pull files — be it git, an S3 bucket or "whatever" — and an automation framework (Vagrant, cloud-init/cfn-init or their equivalents) means never having to worry about having a suitably customized environment.

...Well, if you're not using workspace that's controlled by corporate policy-nazis, at least.

That said, getting overly-reliant on a tricked-out environments can be paaaaaainful if you ever pursue consulting and become a frequent "guest" user. Even absent having to cope with corporate policy-nazis, you simply may not have sufficient access to do a quick, programmatic customization. That's ultimately what broke me of that habit. I'm now mostly a "least common denominator" kind of guy when it comes to environment setups. :(

I created a github repo with all the tools and things I use to setup my development environments. So when I setup a new pc, I just go to the doc and copy and paste my environment back into life.

github.com/joelnet/development-env...

I'd love to be able to just script the whole thing.

I have maybe a different perspective. I try to pick tools that I can mostly use as-is. There is always a little configuration, but if it gets to be a lot, I look for a different tool. Or maybe a similar end result can be achieved by using fiddly tools that can import/export their configuration easily and consistently.

Personally, I value high degrees of flexibility in the code itself, not as much in tools around the code. It seems funny to me when people want highly customizable/disparate coding tools but then use a framework in their code to avoid having to make choices about the real crux of their work. I prefer the framework approach for code tooling (by that, I mean something like an IDE vs text editors + a dozen plugins, each with their own configs) and the library approach for code.

And even with code tools, I try to use them as lightly as possible. Because they will change. A heavy investment in learning these tools will not likely reap a long term reward.

I don't per se dislike setting up my dev environment, but it definitely has a lot of fiddly bits. I really liked notwaldorf's .not-quite-dotfiles set of setup scripts for her environment, and it was pretty easy to reverse-engineer to my own preferred setup.

Tmux automation. That changed my life.
Since i am doing my development in Vim (terminal text editor), and my task runner (gulp) is a nodejs terminal command, and git command line is, of course, in a terminal, I would always run Three tmux windows when I am doing my work. And I had to do it every time I want to continue working on a project.
So what I did was to write a Tmux script that would automate all of that for me, including renaming of windows to normal human names like editor and gulp, instead of sh and node. I just enter a directory I want to work on, that I have been working on before, and run gulp-dev and it runs everything for me and in the end I am in the Vim window hacking away, in 3 seconds or less.

About STARTING a dev environment as if

• setting up gulp tasks
• gitignore
• package.json

well I am just copying them from my previous projects, edit my package.json with simple npm init

and immediately my setup becomes the same as it was on the previous project. Unless I have to do a complete remodel, where still, my package.json npm run start command can be changed, but its running by my gulp-dev script anyways. I never touch the tmux script, its always the same, while my project can change.

You can see my scripts on my github in a dotfiles repository if you want.

Some tips:

• Roll over your configuration from one machine to another when you need to build out your development environment. If you use something like Apple's Time Machine this is super easy, you just restore from backup and you're up to speed on your new machine almost instantly.
• Use note-taking tools like Evernote, Notion or even GitHub Gist to save useful snippets. These can be a hassle to organize and tag, mind you.
• Write down or record what you did when setting up your environment so you can do it again later without forgetting a bunch of steps.

If you want to formalize this more, think about making a git repository and "installer" for your various configs. You can easily do this with a bit of Python, Ruby or Node.js and a "serverless" place to securely save your content like Dropbox or Amazon S3.