Isn’t stuff like Vagrant exactly for this purpose? I know we used it in the past on some Rails projects mainly to share the same environment between different developers on that project. It was a few years back though, don’t some people use Docker for the same use case these days?
Other than that, I also use just 15" macbook and stay mobile 
When I need additional screen, I connect my 12" iPad Pro next to it, that’s actually a very nice setup.
