Initial Development Setup – Building Tailgunner

2 minute reading time; ~300 words

For the last few days, in between holiday prep, I’ve been tinkering with the technical setup work for this project. From my experiences, here are a few notes.

Software

• I’ve selected Laravel for the project, mostly because I haven’t worked in it for a while and I want to update my knowledge of that and PHP.
• Don’t forget to initialize your empty DB before you try to run your migrations 😅
• Vite out of the box isn’t configured for exposing your development environment outside the local machine, so if you want to do this, you can add a host param in the config. Which you then have to make sure to load from .env so you’re not exposing secrets in the code you commit.
• I’ve never used references ( ${APP_NAME} ) in .env before, so those are neat. Not having to keep specific .env variables next to each other so you don’t forget to update matching ones makes more sense.

Development Environment

• Docker Desktop doesn’t seem to play nice with Laravel / Vite. I tinkered with this setup for a few hours, but could never get the page load times below 8-9 seconds.
• VirtualBox is great, I’ve run this setup a lot for various projects. However, shared folders are less so, and I spent a few hours working on this setup before I figured out that their I/O performance was the bottleneck. SAMBA share it is, and the performance is once again great, because the folder itself lives inside the virtual FS, and I can just mount it to my dev machine.

With that, I have a working install and setup, so now I can start writing some code (once we get our requirements and designs done). Hopefully something in these notes are helpful, and if you want to see the code, you can find it on Github.

Cheers!