How we use Boxen to improve DevOps across machines

Sometimes, we end up wiping our laptop for various reasons. But getting back to the same dev environment after a clean install of the OS is pretty difficult. Also, we wanted to unify the versioning of the frameworks that we use in day-to-day life, across machines.

That is where Boxen comes in. Boxen lets us install the system dependencies and everything else that’s necessary to get the developer ship code the first day.

So all that our team has to do is to just open up Cube (Our internal portal), copy and paste the command, and boom, the magic happens on the machine.

It’s a practice at Skcript that before we push any product live, we sit down and refactor the entire source code with the latest SDK or framework or anything that’s even in its beta stage. This is to make sure that the app is secure, and future ready.

But, telling the team members to update the framework and SDK each and every time is tedious. That’s where we just push the update to Boxen, and just let the team know that there’s an update to Boxen, which they can grab from Cube. It. Is. That. Easy.

This solves a huge problem when you work with a group of rebels who care only about the code and love what they do, and they hate spending time setting up, updating and wasting time in getting their dev machine right. Boxen is just so beautiful.

Repeatability of process.

Before Boxen came in, we were using Puppet Forge. But then, it was such a mess, because of inconsistency, and we constantly faced errors and versioning issues when we tried to repeatedly deploy on different machines. But Boxen solved it for us. You set it up, and you hold complete control over the script. Also, its important to know that Boxen is heavily built on top of Puppet.

So what did we get out of this?

We have to agree. This drastically improved our productivity. Since Boxen helped us totally remove off the doubts about the system’s unified configuration with the team members, and allowed us to just do what we love, Code.

If you would like to know more about Boxen, you can checkout our fork here: https://github.com/skcript/our-boxen. As always, we would love to talk more on this.

Originally published at blog.skcript.com.