Ask HN: How do you automate developer onboarding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you automate developer onboarding?

16 pointspageandrew10 comments

What tools do you use to automate the on boarding of new developers, and the setup of new machines?

We have a bunch of dependencies that need to be installed, scripts that need to be injected into their bash profile, configuration files to update, etc.

Right now, we have a messy collection of Bash & Ruby scripts that the developer has to run (and continuously run as updates are made). Wondering if theres anything better out there?

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You could also dockerise the development environment. Rather than having people run these things on their Linux install you can just run a docker environment with it already setup. Then upgrades become easy pulls and running them.

I recently moved to using docker for the common development tools and it has made changes a lot easier. I also read somewhere about using DISPLAY for X programs with docker and so now even the IDE can run in one as well. It takes a while to set it up but it doesn't have the overhead of VM solutions like vagrant and with docker-compose it ends up really easy to just have in a git repository making setup just a git clone and docker install and then docker-compose up.

Examples of brittle but approachable approaches we’ve used:

- Literate bash: https://github.com/bashup/mdsh

- Ansible: https://github.com/bmacauley/ansible-playbook-mac-dev/blob/m...

- Kubernetes: https://abhishek-tiwari.com/local-development-environment-fo...

Example of solid and shareable at scale approach, takes a bit of rocket surgery:

-Nix: https://dzone.com/articles/isolated-development-environment-...

To be clear, we had a Nix committer to help work through kinks. But once all of your team members, local and remote, have lockstep dev environments versioned with the code commits, several other classes of hair pulling go away.

My advice, fwiw: make things more boring and less special. Reduce cleverness and surprises where possible. (I realize this isn't always possible)

Automating on-boarding is possible, but it is usually better to have good docs that breakout into different systems like OSX, windows, Debian/fedora and just have good copy-paste from there. That allows for tweaks to be made more easily when things go wrong, and to update for future devs.

If you really need to automate, write your own installers to do the work inserting code, installing dependencies, etc and expand to support different systems where necessary. This can be as simple as a github repo that you pulldown and run an installer for, that automatically hooks in to the shell and provides an easy path for updates.

If managing shell scripts becomes too unwieldy, you could use Puppet or Ansible to provision your local machine, just like you would when you'd use these tools to provision a new server instance elsewhere. This works great when you combine it with a Virtual Machine managed through Vagrant. The guest OS is then managed completely via Vagrant and Ansible/Puppet, and the only host OS software you then need is a working Vagrant environment, which can often be installed completely through the OS's package management system.

For laptop setup at a company you should be using some sort of MDM software. It's essentially configuration management, but with the understanding that this is for users who will want to change things. If you're an all Mac shop, take a look at Jamf or at Fleetsmith. If you've got a mix, there are some products like Airwatch that support Windows and Mac. These tools allow you to set up applications and configurations. I generally run a white-listed "app" store where users can download apps, scripts and new configurations. Or alternatively you can force install anything you really need.

I'll also second using Docker or virtual machines if possible. It makes the setup and continued support much easier.

Just write a bash script

Vagrant mostly.

We build a custom vagrant box with dependencies pre-installed, and then run setup on top of that.

Admittedly we don’t have many “tools” like you mentioned - just a couple of shell scripts in the git repo itself.

If you need to install host OS level software I’d just write some shell scripts to automate the steps.

You could create an image with everything preinstalled. Just install it and you have a lot of stuff ready right away.

For things they have todo / resources they should look through, you could use ChiefOnboarding.com (Full Disclosure: I have built this)

Have you tried Boxen?[1]

It allows you to automate installing libraries and running scripts by writing Puppet manifests.

[1] https://github.com/boxen/our-boxen

Have you considered writing packages for whatever package manager your OS uses?

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