In our local office, we have a developement server, with kind of limited resources. When multiple developers are using this server, the load becomes really big on it, to the point it starts becoming unresponsive (at the moment 6 different developers are working on the same dev server, and it shows, when all of us are performing work). However, we all have rather strong laptop computers, and we are trying to implement a developement environment, where instead of working on the developement server, each programmers laptop would become his own personal developement server.
The biggest problem that we are facing, is that we have only a single dedicated IP address in the office at the moment. This was not a problem while we were all developing on the dev server, as the dev server had apache installed, and each programmer had a specific sub-domain, so everyone could access his personal resources with the help of apache.
The only way we managed to circumvent this at the moment, is to use the old dev server as a kind of router. How everything is set up at the moment, is, that we have a domain name, let's call it dev.com. Every programmer has a subdomain under this domain name, in the following order: programmer1.dev.com, programmer2.dev.com, etc. The DNS for the dev.com domain name, points to the external IP address of our router, and the router is set up, that any request via the 80 or 443 ports, should be routed to the local ip address of our old dev server, from where apache, using a ProxyPass directive, and the hostname received, routes the calls to the specific local ip address of each of the programmers laptops.
This does work at the moment, but I was wondering, how much load will this place on the old dev server? Basically, while we were in the old developement environment, the load came from various processes that we are running during developement (for example webpack or different nodejs scripts that we are writing, etc.) - these would all disappear at the moment, but nonetheless, all the calls would need to go through the server in the future also?
Another good thing that we managed to resolve with this setup, was the SSL certificates. As we are not having dedicated IP addresses for each separate laptop, we could only add self-signed certificates to the sites that we are using in developement mode, however, it seems that by using ProxyPass on the old dev server, the browser is able to resolve the certificate provided by Let's encrypt to the hostname on the old dev server, and it is not complaining. Could problems arise from this "hack" in the future?
