What are the essential things to have on a development server?

Question

This is inspired by the question, "What to do with a home server?"

So far I can think of:

• A continuous integration build server, like luntbuild or cruise controll
• Source control
• A bug tracker/process tracker
• A copy of all the artifacts you have on production

What about:

• An IDE and remote desktop? (Although personally I think IDE's are still best on a client)

Answer 1

A debugger of some sort...

Answer 2

• A web server
• A script to migrate from dev to test
• A script to migrate test to production
• a script to backup your svn to S3 or similar offsite backup storage
• vi/vim because you are going to need a good text editor
• sed, awk and ruby for the really hard scripts

Answer 3

Local wiki server for documentation, notes, etc.

Answer 4

valgrind and/or other profiling software

Answer 5

postmortem debugging tools, for Windows that is:

• umdh (for memory leaks)
• drwtsn32 (for crashes),
• cdb (to get minidumps from hung apps),
• windbg (to inspect the minidumps).

Also put a symbol server on there to store your own app's symbols (without having to remember which set correspond to which version of the app)

These are all things to help debug apps as if they were run on a customer machine - not your development machine with its debugger, sources, symbols etc. If you can diagnose problems there, you can take the tools onsite to fix problems you'll never see when you run them at home.

Also put a file share on and store all the installers for development tools you'd use - so you can easily get all the bits you need to set up a new development workstation.