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Comment by jonathankau | Hacker News Reader

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.

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You hit it right on the head. We realize that this tool isn't going to be for everyone, but it will definitely help others. We're trying to make it so that developers don't have to worry about configuring an environment and just focus on coding.

Even an experienced developer could benefit from this if they don't want to take the time to configure environments.

I think it's great what you're doing to reduce friction for developers.

I don't think people want to take time to configure environments. It's just that we've all been bitten by environment configuration and sometimes configuring it in a specific way matters.

I don't think the tool is for me, as it feels like too much of an opinionated framework.

However, I really appreciate you open sourcing it under a permissive license, as I can see myself using some of your shell and go scripts in the future.

Thanks.

Yes, I agree that setting up dev/live environments needs to be simpler. As even for experienced devs, it is awfully time consuming and the entire process is not streamlined. The advent of Docker have made the process slightly better but it brought other complexities yet to be resolved (deploying local environment's volumized code-base, etc). I checked out Nanobox and liked the concept but I do get the feeling it is "yet another Docker builder" with it's own build file.

I've learn how to setup everything to develop NodeJS apps and I still hate it. I wish I had nanobox a month ago when I was setting up a new machine against a tight deadline.

Believe me. We share the same sentiment about setting up almost any environment, so we thought we'd bite the bullet and do all the work for you, so you don't have to :)

Then learn Chef/Puppet or something like that and write/reuse recipes to install and configure whatever you need to configure.

I haven't set up an environment manually in a few years: I simply have my own recipes for the types of apps I'm developing in Chef (most of them just minor tweaks or config changes over existing recipes), my own vagrant boxes (I like different flavors of linux for different types of apps) and so on.

Starting a new project implies choosing the necessary recipes, adding them to a vagrant file, 'vagrant up' and wait a few minutes until everything is set up. Done.

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