The last couple websites I've worked on have all used remote development environments and I'm fairly convinced it's the way to go.

Running the website on your Mac will be fine at first but once you add any significant level of complexity, the inconsistencies between Macports and Ubuntu will rear its ugly head.

So really the question is, virtual machines or remote dev environments?

I think if you're in a situation where you have unreliable, flaky, or high latency Internet, virtual machines are the way to go. If you have consistently fast Internet, remote is better.

Remote is better because you don't have to keep your virtual machines in sync with the rest of your team. DB, queuing system, daemons are all in sync.

What a difference > 140 chars makes.

Bert pretty throughly explained my feelings above, which I shared on twitter as:

"@jot I never set up a local environment, remote dev in same configuration as production. Maybe virtual machine if I need to do work offline."
twitter.com

and:

"@jot Biggest for me are: I can work from any computer with a text editor (or a terminal), and I don't have to worry about inconsistency."
twitter.com

I would add that a collection of scripts to automatically scp changes to the remote dev server on save, as well as resetting dev on deploy (or some other schedule) play a big part in making it work well for me.

It's also nice to not worry about breaking a local dev env when I do OS upgrades.

An interesting question - and I was surprised to see that you guys choose remote dev environments over running virtual machines locally. If I were building something large and distributed that depended on massive amounts of data (Recollect?) I think maintaining a parallel local dev environment would be more trouble than its worth.

However, for certain jobs I think the opposite is true. Tools like vagrantup.com are great for those.

It is certainly a lot of work to maintain a parallel dev environment for Recollect, especially considering production Recollect has about 8 servers, but it's essential. The dev environment isn't a complete replica of the production environment, but it does have accounts for me, Chris, and Timoni that have all our services linked to it, and all the supporting daemons and queues run, too.

When we test our code, we want to test it against current data - cronjobs run nightly on our dev server, same as prod, so we always have the latest tweets, photos, and checkins from all our services. The dev server uses different API keys for each of the four services so the rate-limiting is insulated.

I'll check out Vagrant, thanks for the link!

I can see the appeal in having a full-on remote dev environment for a project. How do you handle the actual logistics of doing your dev that way?

Do you edit/run any of the code locally as you work? Or do you do your coding on the remote box over SSH?

Do you guys use something like Chef or Puppet to handle server provisioning?

From small to medium size projects I use local and for large* ones, I run a dedicated virtual server (which of course is not public) and do my things there. However I've been really curious about integrating git with all of my projects, but never really got around to it, does anyone have experience with that?

*Keep in mind that by large I do not mean Facebook or Twitter or any of such.