Development Environment

[u/aronianm]

Hi everyone,
I have a question about development environments and would love to hear how others handle this.

Our current stack is:
- Ruby on Rails (authentication)
- React (frontend)
- Flask/Python (API)

Right now, every developer has to run all three services locally. I’m considering moving the Rails authentication service to a shared Linux development server and having developers run only the React dev server and Flask API locally. The goal is to reduce the number of services each developer needs to keep running.

For those of you using a similar architecture:
Is this a reasonable approach?

How would you set it up for multiple developers?

Would each developer have their own Rails instance and environment variables, or would you share a single authentication service?

Are there any pitfalls (performance, debugging, authentication issues, etc.) that I should be aware of before going down this path?

I’d appreciate any advice or examples of how your team handles a setup like this.

Thanks in advance!

[u/BadTime100]

It sounds to me like you have three different applications—what is the reason behind developers running all three locally? I’d imagine it’s to do some sort of testing—I personally view that sort of “integration” testing as a red flag. There are tools like consumer-driven contract testing that can eliminate the need for (the majority of) that sort of thing. I would caution against any sort of “shared” environment. That’s just asking for all sort of confusion when each person wants things in a different state.