Dev in a Jail

I work a lot on FreeBSD and have made increasing use of jails over time. The bastille and rocinante tools from Christer Edwards make this pretty easy to build and maintain.

These days I do most work in jails, for long-running services like DNS and PostgreSQL, and to isolate programs, like browsers. Most of my dev is in jails as well, where I can wipe the slate clean and start again from fully scripted state at any time.

One of the simple pleasures of developing in a jail is that very little is happening there. Today I had to work on the host as well as in the jail. The volume of processes on the host is large compared with an individual jail, and made diagnosis of one of my bugs difficult. I had lost track of how nice it is to work with a minimal setup that one gets with a focused yet fully capable jail. So this is really a TIR entry – Today I Relearned.