There are one million ways to configure your cloud servers. Here are a few tools to consider for web development efficiency.
Efficient Web Development Tools for Cloud Hosting
This is a quick list of tools with links to resources to help you learn more. We are assuming a Windows client developing on a LAMP stack but these tools can help with many configurations. If there are tools missing, please share with us in the comments below.
Eclipse
Open Source IDE for Web Development. Offers many plug-ins to improve your efficiency and address your choice of programming language.
PuTTY
SSH Client for Windows development. Is this essential? Depends on the developer. Many can get by with Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) in Eclipse. Personally I use both.
- Download PuTTY
- Beginner Tutorial using PuTTY with Amazon EC2
Git
Version control system that is free, open source and has a light footprint. Allows you to quickly revert to old versions of your project, allows teams to work concurrently and allows you to efficiently retrieve code from repositories such as github.
- Excellent Beginner’s Git Tutorial
- Another beginner’s Git Tutorial for Eclipse Users
- If you want to use eGit in Eclipse (recommended), start with the eGit User Guide and then follow this eGit tutorial
- Download git
Vagrant
Synthesize development environments with production environments and also across teams. Vagrant allows you to create Virtual Machines to use for development. You can quickly & easily set up one configuration and then reproduce this configuration across projects, across developers & across environments.
- “Yes, it really is this simple” Vagrant Tutorial
- Download Oracle VirtualBox (required for Vagrant)
- Download Vagrant
Chef
While the previous 4 tools are no-brainers, Chef is a personal choice. Chef is a systems management tool that will help with automating server tasks and configurations. There is much debate between Chef, Puppet and others. In the end, choose one and learn it. My choice was Chef.
- Chef Tutorial “in minutes”
- Another great Chef Tutorial focused on one server
- Download Chef
Putting All the Web Development Tools Together
I came a great tutorial that shows a basic EC2, Vagrant & Lamp integration. After you learn about each tool individually, perhaps try the tutorial to help with putting it all together.
Which Web Development Tools Help with Efficiency?
Share your favorite web development in the comments below. What did I miss? Let me know about it. Sharing helps all of us to improve.