Docker

2-minute read
software development

I’ve enjoyed using Docker for my projects for these reasons:

  • Various projects on my system have varying dependencies (such as Nokogiri), and ensuring all of my projects are always in a working state has been problematic for me in the past.
  • Upgrading or moving to a new computer is always a pain. Getting a new Macbook Pro was always a double-edged sword. For one thing, getting a faster processor and more RAM would be a huge win. But having to re-install everything to get my Rails app working again so I can keep development moving was never fun. Dockerizing my projects has let me avoid this pain.
  • Upgrading major versions of macOS was previously a risky move, again, because of changing system libraries between OS versions. No longer with all your project dependencies living in your Docker container.
  • I can run locally against multiple versions of databases like Mongo or Postgres. I can even run a cluster to make sure my configuration for these services are setup right.
  • I can test out different versions of dependencies quickly within a container without worrying about messing up my development environment: just rebuild if the new version doesn’t work.
  • Having explicit versions for production images lets me think about releases as discrete artifacts that can be communicated with my team about. Debugging can be done with an image that can be run in different environments.
  • Getting CI running is fairly trivial with Docker Compose.
  • Once an image has been stabilized, I can use it to speed up CI runs
    • I’ve sped up my this blog’s deployments from 6 minutes to 1 minute.
  • A production image contains all the correct dependencies I need to run it, including system libraries.
  • Rollbacks for images with changes to system dependencies becomes trivial.
  • Developers can work in different platforms rather than forcing the team to only one OS. This works if the team decides to only develop within containers.
  • Onboarding new developers to the team becomes much simpler. That long README of steps to provision the dev environment becomes:
    • Install Docker
    • Pull repo
    • docker-compose up