Code breaking in production is usually down to… well.. who the hell knows? Different machines, different versions of some language, different office furniture, coffee etc.
The guys from Bowery.io have developed a platform that allows, for example, a new employee to to spin up a machine, connect to the same instance as other colleagues, develop and ship code using identical environments which means you don’t need to worry about spending hours on configuration to create the same set up as colleagues, or at least something close.
Bowery environments are exported as a tar file and launched via Docker or Chroot for deployment and throughout production it will merge any changes to the environment, layering them on top of each other meaning that if two different versions of a language are saved by two different developers, the more recent update will take precedence.
Bowery also received $1.5 million in seed funding last October for further development of the tool which is now released as a desktop application.
Whilst it runs on the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server image out of the box Bowery say they are able to set up other Linux distributions which means that you can use any full stack platform that the image supports (Ruby, Python, PHP, Go etc) hosted remotely on Google Cloud but they are able to customise set ups for clients wishing to use other providers as well as integrating it with any CI tool.
Although demonstrated on the command line, this short guide by phpacademy shows how to set up a php development environment using Bowery.
