Web development on QubesOS?

Hello,
I have been an avid user of QubesOS for last few years and am relatively comfortable navigating my way around various Linux distributions. As I learn more, I would obviously have to move offline to writing and testing web apps locally, however, I was wondering if anyone has experience using QubesOS for development?

In theory it should work seamlessly but it would be good to get first hand advise from someone who has used Qubes in the past to develop on. Best practices? Some common problems as well as workarounds? Or anything else that you might think I should know?

( Using Ubuntu on a second HDD is also very much an option if absolutely necessary. )

Thank you! :slight_smile:

I guess using Qubes is pretty experimental as it is, could not find any help on a web search as well. :frowning:

@cryptographicfool
I have never used QubesOS. It should be fine to develop on, just as long as you can install the text editor and other tools you need.

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Thanks for your reply! :blush:

I ended up making a test development appVM ( based on debian 9 stretch) under my qubes, and setup XAMPP along with ATOM and some plugins, Gimp for graphics work. ( Want to keep it open source as much as possible on this machine as I have another macbookpro to work on if needed) and honestly it works quite well. :slight_smile:

I am learning git and working on my FCC projects at the moment. Workes quite well I must say. Really hoping to contribute to some open source projects in the future.

Cheers!

PS. If someone needs help setting up QubesOS or setting up a development enviorenment under Qubes, I could do a blog post about the same or you can get in touch with me via messaage.

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QubesOs seems interesting. From what I glance through, it uses some kind of virtualization or container to sandbox all your apps, so that’s a nice feature.

Indeed, it focuses on security from targeted attacks by the use of sand-boxing. It eats tonne of ram though, depending on your use case obviously. IMO it’s an overkill if you are not into security or like really need it. One famous example being, Edward Snowden used and advocated Qubes. :smiley:

I disagree it being overkill. Giving sophisticated certain attacks are, I can see future operating systems going into this direction.

It would be good if OSes are heading there. :slight_smile:
But the setup process as well as the hardware requirements can put some people off Qubes.
I love it though. :blush:

Your best bet is probably to use the HVM, which is where you install an OS on top of QubeOS. This may sound like a VM, but, as Qubes says:

A Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine (HVM) , also known as a Fully-Virtualized Virtual Machine , utilizes the virtualization extensions of the host CPU. These are typically contrasted with Paravirtualized (PV) VMs.

So you can install debian on it and install Apache2 or NGINX. :grin:

If that all sound a bit crazy to do, you could use a small raspberry pi as a server. That’s what I do. :upside_down_face:

I set up a debian dev environment under an HVM, it works quite flawlessly. :smiley:

Abd the new Pi 4 B looks really good, I am thinking of using it as a private git server by installing gitlab on there. (when I find one in stock that is.)