Suggestion - Vagrant setup for Development

Is it really good that everyone has the same development environment? I can think of  some reasons why it may not be good, like if there may be a problem with a specific version of PHP, or a specific operating system, yet everyone is developing on the same environment so they don't notice.

It's nice to have a common environment that makes it easy for developers to jump on board, but you would certainly want to setup your development environment according to the server environment you intend to use. For example, I like to keep the primary development target for my website in synch with the server I'm actually using, so I am less likely to use some PHP feature in development that doesn't work when I deploy to the server.

Further, doing CI4 development alongside active development and maintenance of a CI3 website means I need separate environments for each, especially since my site's web server doesn't have PHP 7 installed, yet.

Bonfire

Practical CodeIgniter 3
CodeIgniter Testing Guide

Is it really good that everyone has the same development environment? I can think of  some reasons why it may not be good, like if there may be a problem with a specific version of PHP, or a specific operating system, yet everyone is developing on the same environment so they don't notice.

It's nice to have a common environment that makes it easy for developers to jump on board, but you would certainly want to setup your development environment according to the server environment you intend to use. For example, I like to keep the primary development target for my website in synch with the server I'm actually using, so I am less likely to use some PHP feature in development that doesn't work when I deploy to the server.

Further, doing CI4 development alongside active development and maintenance of a CI3 website means I need separate environments for each, especially since my site's web server doesn't have PHP 7 installed, yet.

I see your argument for CI4 and PHP7. I use Ubuntu, and tried installing PHP7, and was not successful. I actually got it mostly installed, but getting it to fully work with MariaDB and phpMyAdmin was not easy, and then looking at the problems that people were having with it, I ended up reverting back to the default (5.5.9). I suppose this is a case where Vagrant would come in handy.

BTW, it looks like the new version of Ubuntu (16.04) will have PHP7 included! I just searched for this and found some info after I posted.

Expert Website Development - Temecula, CA
Community Auth For CodeIgniter 3

Hello all,
I have been playing around with Docker a little bit lately ( by no means do I fully understand it ) but I have built a simple dockerised environment with :
Ubuntu, PHP7 and MariaDB - split over 2 containers as per the docker philosophy. It's still very much a work in progress.

https://github.com/bart88/docker_codeigniter