I am a "solo developer, with no collaboration needs most times" who is struggling with local development vs simply spinning up a production vm and coding everything on it.
I understand the benefits of possibly making a mistake and testing before deployment, but my apps usually are for customers who have paid for them and when i need to make a change i simply ssh into the machine and make the change.
I was just wondering if i am the only old school developer who still develops directly on the the productions machine.
I understand the benefits for teams, but being a solo developer, am i missing something? Local development simply seems like an extra step.
I understand your point and I used to do the same thing. Until you run into the point of accidently making a typo (we alll make every now and then) which makes the production environment not working anymore. Customers don't like that, even if you fix it quickly. So it is not like you are doing it in two fold. If you set up a code repository (svn or something) you code on your own machine without the customer noticing it and after it passes your quality check, just pull the new version automatically to the customer. This also makes it more convient for you to program, because you don't have the risk of the production environment being out of order due to a little mistake.
Just my 2 cents.
(ps: Most of the time there might even be a development environment, especially when it is connected to other systems, so: Develop, Test, Production.
Thanks JacDev for your reply. I have had my share of typo's, that's for sure. I also have been experimenting with online ide's like Cloud 9 and Code anywhere so that if i'm out and about and I don't have my laptop on me, i can make/fix bugs if they occur from anywhere, but still they always want me to setup a dev environment. So it seems that the dev environment is the way to go. How do you normally deploy..via github?
Yes if you want to be more 'professional' I would suggest to always use a test environment. The time to set it up and use it are really quickly 'earned back'. Regarding the deployment. I have my own server which I am using with an SVN as repository and I deploy via that server. But I think that is not common and not easy to arrange. So I think it is better to listen about tips from other developers about deployment options.
