MacOS Sierra Upgrade - Java/Grails Development Environment Changes

As background, at work, we use Vagrant/VirtualBox to virtualize the development environment for most Java/Groovy developers. When I upgraded “recently” to MacOS Sierra we ran into a few less than straightforward issues; hopefully, this will help someone else out there.  

Googling our monolith’s new found startup errors suggested that I needed to update my old versions to the latest of Vagrant 1.8.7 and VirtualBox 5.1.8. After which the Grails 2.x app started up without error. Below are the related search results that pointed me in that direction.

VirtualBox error on MacOS Sierra

Error - Failed to open a session for the virtual machine

There was an error while executing `VBoxManage`, a CLI used by Vagrant for controlling VirtualBox. The command and stderr is shown below.

However even after updating those, running our unit and integration tests were 10x slower than before the MacOS upgrade.  We were seeing results similar to this StackOverflow entry:

SBT test extremely slow on MacOS Sierra
I seem to have a problem with performance of “sbt test” after upgrading to macOS Sierra. On a previous version of OS X it took about 40-50 seconds to finish. macOS Sierra times are much higher than…
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39636792/sbt-test-extremely-slow-on-macos-sierra/39698914#39698914

In my case, I have added the following in /etc/hosts (partial):

127.0.0.1 localhost <computername>.local
::1 localhost <computername>.local

Replace <computername> with the name of your computer found @ ‘System Preferences -> Sharing -> Computer Name’

Other helpful MacOS Sierra upgrade links:

https://thoeni.io/post/macos-sierra-java - java.net.InetAddress: getLocalHost() slow after MacOS Sierra upgrade?
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/7087 - Find alternative for InetAddress.getLocalHost().getHostName()
https://github.com/thoeni/inetTester - Quickly check elapsed time to retrieve local hostname
https://haskovec.com/2016/09/29/macos-sierra-massive-slowdown-in-java-networking - MacOS Sierra massive slowdown in Java networking

There were also OpenSSH changes that you might run into as well - https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2449/_index.html

Tech Podcasts - What are you listening to?

After a hiatus from listening to dev podcasts. I’m back at again after some “internet friends” started their own.  I would love to know, what you’ve been listening to lately.

Funtime Exception - iTunes - RSS - Local Dev Podcast - JVM centric

Minnov8 Gang Podcast - iTunes - RSS - Local MN Tech Scene - Wish both these had a strong developer on them to give clarifications on in-depth tech topics. 

TechdotMN Podcast - RSS - Local MN Tech Scene

The ChangeLog - iTunes - RSS - OSS tools

Full Stack Radio - iTunes - RSS - FrontEnd Leaning Developers 

Cognicast - iTunes - RSS  - Clojure centric - Good format and other JVM stuff 

Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots - iTunes - RSS - Ruby-centric but have been talking Go recently; A semi-regular podcast dev is local now and works at LeadPages

/dev/hell - Development Hell Podcast - iTunes - RSS - PHP but the guys are funny