[BrandonBradley]

In regards to Python and Ruby (on Rails), have you found the tools pyenv and rbenv (or rvm)? Node also has a similar tool, nvm. These all allow you to manage separate version of languages and sets of package dependencies. I have found them invaluable in keeping concerns separated.

I lean more towards local installation for software that can handle multiple applications/connections from one install (e.g. Postgres) unless I'm preparing my staging environment. Sometimes I use Docker containers for local services (e.g. ZeroMQ) while developing so I don't incur a large overhead for every service my application requires. VMs are used for staging.

I follow this pattern on Linux and OSX.

[tonyarkles]

I tend to agree. Most of my web development work lately has been with Rails, although a bit has been with Node, and a bunch in Python in the past. Rbenv is wonderful for managing different versions, npm takes care of local dependency installs quite nicely, and virtualenv solves the problem for Python too. I generally just install a local copy of postgresql and redis, and I'm good to go without having to mess with a bunch of different VMs and things like that.