I'll preface my comment saying that my experience with docker is relatively light. But PHP is probably the one language/environment where using docker makes a l

I'll preface my comment saying that my experience with docker is relatively light. But PHP is probably the one language/environment where using docker makes a lot of sense (vs others like node). There's a lot of versions of PHP and more importantly, anyone who's worked with PHP from the ground up knows, there's a lot of PHP modules you have to install to the system, as each project makes use of different libraries (especially ones coming from PECL etc.). Nowadays a lot of stuff are on composer instead, but there's still enough modules that don't come by a default yum/apt-get/pacman install of PHP, that are commonly used. I have side projects that I started years ago where I have to list out all the PHP extensions I use in the readme so I know what to install to get them working. Docker lets you get by all of that. In contrast with other languages like nodejs, you can almost always just use nvm to switch to the desired node version for the project, do a npm install, and it will just run. For something like that, there's a lot less need of docker for dev.