The term lightweight development environment means an environment configured with minimal GUI support and a text editor rather than IDEs. It is for developers who prefer working on the command line.
A base instance provides a template for provisioning environments tailored for different kinds of development and testing work.
- Linux: CentOS 7 - Fedora style
- Linux: Debian 9 - Debian style
- Linux: Manjaro - Arch style
- Linux: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS - Ubuntu style
- Unix: TrueOS Desktop - FreeBSD style
For most purposes, the instance will be usable as a 512 MB VM, and can be containerized or loaded onto a small computer such as a Raspberry Pi. The instance can run with any hypervisor.
Individuals have preferences regarding the underlying operating system, even if the command line, common system commands, general behavior of Unix/Linux systems, functionality of Vim and NeoVim, and available packages are all essentially the same. It may be that you are accustomed to a certain package manager or directory structure conventions or whatever, and you want your lightweight development environment to be consistent with your other systems. With that in mind, I tried to find practical ways to stand up a usable lightweight environment using a variety of distros as starting points.