10 ms·

Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)

108 points by albertoCaroM 6y ago

tyingq 5y ago
"Choosing a base image can be quite daunting. I’m always a fan of Alpine Linux for my application containers, so that’s what I chose." Just be aware that means the musl libc, which is often fine, but not always. Software that expects glibc can crash or have unpredictable behavior. The JVM is a good example, unless you get a JVM that was originally built against musl. And sometimes also issues with busybox, where it differs from other implementations of the same tools.
- IceWreck 5y ago
  Yeah, this is why I use debian slim as an image for most projects unless I'm prioritizing small size. Its small and popular enough that a lot of other images already use it and chances are that you dont have to redownload it.
- codethief 5y ago
  Case in point: "Using Alpine can make Python Docker builds 50× slower", https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/
  - williamjackson 5y ago
    That article should be titled, “Most Python packages do not upload an Alpine-compatible wheel to PyPI.” If you know where to find Alpine-compatible wheels, or host your own, Alpine has no build-speed penalty.
    - guitarbill 5y ago
      Where do you find Alpine-compatible wheels? Many ones uploaded to PyPI aren't, because e.g. both GitHub actions [0] and Azure pipelines [1] don't have Alpine images. Is it reasonable to expect maintainers of small, open-source libraries to write and maintain their own Alpine runners? I guess if you know your company's workflow depends on Alpine, you can build and cache them yourself. But the wider community doesn't benefit from that. [0] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runners/about-github-hosted-runners#supported-runners-and-hardware-resources https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runne... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml#software https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agen...
      - williamjackson 5y ago
        I was not aware of prior work so I maintain Alpine wheels for packages I use personally in a GitHub org. https://github.com/alpine-wheels/index https://github.com/alpine-wheels/index Besides my own needs, only one other person has requested additional packages, which I was happy to add. Maintenance is minimal, mostly just approving pull requests created by Dependabot.
        guitarbill 5y ago
        That's pretty slick! Thanks
    - di 5y ago
      Exactly zero packages upload Alpine-compatible wheels to PyPI. The manylinux specification assumes glibc, so there is no valid distribution format which would allow the publication of non-glibc wheels. However there is an in-progress PEP to support it: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0656/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0656/
  - angrais 5y ago
    I've used alpine images for python in production and not run into any of these issues. The key is to know how to use multistage builds to cache layers.
zby 5y ago
Can you run ansible or terraform inside a docker container? There are two parts of the dev environment - the programmer preferences and the project libraries and other infrastructure. What I would like is to have a way to compose those two and ideally something that would work the same way inside a docker container as in a full VM.
- conradludgate 5y ago
  Yes to terraform. We use it at our work to setup some dynamodb tables for testing locally. We mount the .terraform folder.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I have a co-worker who had the idea of stuffing Ansible into a container. This would allow anyone to easily run any Ansible playbooks without having to deal with dependencies and versions. It’s absolutely terrible to use. You end up having wrapper scripts to make it even remotely usable. Mounting things in the right locations is a nightmare, even minor changes becomes a hassel. For Ansible, just learn to use virtualenvs. Terraform may be a little better.
  - narism 5y ago
    We do the same thing but I wouldn’t call it a nightmare /hassle. It’s exactly one helper script to start up the container with the right volumes and a few aliases to make commands (ansible / ansible-playbook / etc) work seamlessly. Some good tips here: https://jonathan.bergknoff.com/journal/run-more-stuff-in-docker/ https://jonathan.bergknoff.com/journal/run-more-stuff-in-doc...
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  Nix and Guix are both answers to that combined need.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Grab the ansible-runner image from dockerhub and it's a great slimmed down image to run ansible: https://ansible-runner.readthedocs.io/en/stable/container.html https://ansible-runner.readthedocs.io/en/stable/container.ht... To provision stuff _inside_ your docker container from ansible I've found packer is the easiest way to do it: https://www.packer.io/docs/provisioners/ansible-local https://www.packer.io/docs/provisioners/ansible-local There was apparently a tool called ansible-bender that did something similar but was abandoned. Packer makes it easy to define a container that's provisioned with a local ansible playbook. Ultimately though I think using ansible with containers is a code smell. If you provision in a container with ansible you have to pull in an entire Python install, and that blows up your container size fast. You can do multi-stage builds and carefully extract the stuff you need but it's a real pain. IMHO minimal shell scripts that run in very tightly defined and controlled environments of the dockerfile (i.e. they don't have to be super flexible or support any and every system, just this container) are the way to go.
nyellin 5y ago
Cool stuff. A few months ago I looked into building a CITRIX alternative based on the idea that you would run application frontends in a local secure docker container while running the backend in the cloud. E.g. you could run VSCode locally while actually compiling in a kubernetes cluster. I eventually ruled out the idea for business reasons, but from a technical perspective it's doable and probably useful. At the time I thought the primary advantage would be reduced cloud costs and lower latency.
_ZeD_ 5y ago
if you want an OS as ide... wouldn't be easier to install emacs?
- medstrom 5y ago
  Until you reimplement every language as transpilers to elisp, that's not the same thing at all. In this respect, Emacs is actually in the same tool category as VSCode or Vim. As you'd set up Dev Containers in VSCode, you'd set up TRAMP in Emacs to ssh into a Docker environment, or (more likely for Emacsians I guess) access a Guix environment or Nix shell.
swym 5y ago
That is a nice write up. We use a very similar set up to containerise our embedded tool chains. Additionally, we use a wrapper script to symlink the current containerised project to the same location in the host system. This ensures, that outputs in the containerised environment points to valid paths in the host: E. g.: docker mount: /home/me/dev/proj1234 > /workspace symlink in host: ln -sfn /home/me/dev/proj1234 /workspace
chillpenguin 5y ago
I only get a new laptop once every several years. Doesn't really seem worth it to me personally. I also sort of like starting fresh in a way. Granted I have my dot-files on github to make that part easier. But I don't mind running the install command for things as they come up. I'm curious if there are other benefits to this approach though besides just saving time when setting up a new machine. The article mentioned "you end up with (in my opinion) a much more flexible working environment." Any ideas what they might mean?
- spockz 5y ago
  I now go a bit further. I used to keep my dot files around as well but last time I decided to go completely fresh and I learned about powerline10k (more performant than powerline9k) and sdkman (an installer for multiple and different sdk flavours) and had a nice evening to boot. If I hadn’t started over I would just have used the old config and not enjoyed the new benefits.
- skrueger 5y ago
  I think I share your line of thinking. What are the benefits? Are there down sides to being operating in the docker container for everything?
- medstrom 5y ago
  Reproducible dev environment. Easier to reproduce some bugs for fixing. More certainty that it doesn't just work on your laptop because you have an undocumented dependency installed. Easier to test the setup process on a clean machine and vary things about the machine setup. To test what happens if you have Python available system-wide vs. if you don't. More precise development history since you have docker-compose.yml under Git, making "time travel" easier. There's all kinds of little benefits that don't seem that important until you have use for them. Of course Guix and Nix go closer to being actually reproducible, but Docker is better than nothing.
  - kamac 5y ago
    To add maybe one more point to this - it’s so much easier to run parts of the pipeline for devs who aren’t familiar with the environment. It can also serve as a documentation for what’s required to develop.
ximm 5y ago
Especially when doing IT support, having docker on the machines is rather unlikely. This sounds like a good usecase for appimages.
mintyc 5y ago
Update: The original post is from January 2019. Ashley Broadley's github page at https://github.com/ls12styler https://github.com/ls12styler sadly doesn't contain a repo with his rust dev work to date (I will ask him as it has some really good stuff in the article.) ---- Very nice. I'm doing similar at the moment. Maybe take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/mifrjj/what_extra_dev_tools_do_you_recommend/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/mifrjj/what_extra_dev... A list of useful cargo built in and third party sub commands. As you note, common recommended app crates (source) should be gathered separately. I have several other links and ideas eg supporting different targets such as x86_64-linux-unknown-musl but too long for this post!
de6u99er 5y ago
I run VSCode and Eclipse Theia in Docker containers and access them via browser. Depending on what I do I start either with a Java, Node, or Python container.
krisgenre 5y ago
Does anyone use docker for full-fledged development on OSX? I am a Linux user and tried setting up a dev environment for my colleagues on OSX but file system I/O was extremely slow and completely unusable.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  IIRC there are some mount options that might help if you search the docker docs, but for me I just create some local docker volumes to hold my code and mount those instead of mounting host folders. It feels a little weird and unnatural that your code is 'hidden' in docker's volume folder (under /var/lib/docker/volumes) in the VM instead of in a folder on your host machine. But it gets you into more of a mindset that this is just a temporary checkout and the real persistent home for the code is your source repository (github, etc.), so you don't let things linger without being checked into a branch somewhere.
- karlshea 5y ago
  Yes. Check out what ddev is doing, there’s some options for using NFS mounts that are acceptably fast.
- kamac 5y ago
  Yep, I use it. There are two tricks to mitigate this: 1. Using a :delegated or :cached flag when using a bind mount can speed it up a bit 2. For folders that need a lot of RW, but don’t need to be shared with the host (think node_modules or sbt cache), I bind a docker volume managed by docker-compose. This makes it extremely fast. Here's an example: https://gist.github.com/kamac/3fbb0548339655d37f3d786de19ae65b https://gist.github.com/kamac/3fbb0548339655d37f3d786de19ae6...
- krisgenre 5y ago
  Thanks for the tips guys. Will definitely try them out.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Yes I do. I am trying to develop on OSX since a few days, using Docker. But between the low amount of ram on the laptop and the bad IOs performances I decided to give another try to Github Codespaces and I'm very pleasantly surprised. It feels fast enough and I can switch from computer without thinking about it.
adriancr 5y ago
Nice, similar thing to what I do, a few more things: 1. If you want X11 (haven't figured out audio yet) "-e DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix/:/tmp/.X11-unix:ro" 2. Firefox > --shm-size=2g and start with: firefox --no-remote 3. Entering container Just map a command to enter the container with the name as parameter / optional image type as second. That way you get a new fresh environment whenever you want Command would just start if it's not started or exec otherwise. I go extra length to have docker start up a ssh server inside container and I just ssh into it.
- jraph 5y ago
  For audio, maybe you can use pavucontrol on your host to make pulseaudio accept network connections, and then use PULSE_SERVER=your_host_ip command_which_plays_audio in the docker container? (I haven't tried it).
  - fock 5y ago
    or better (because there's no nasty reachability from browsers or the net) just use an unix-domain-socket and bind mount that and the secret cookie to the container (I use that with bubblewrap for appimages)
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Go the next step and run a local kubernetes cluster with kind or k3s (it will take you 30 seconds to have a k8s cluster going). IMHO the kubectl CLI is a lot more logical than docker's CLI. You can create all your local storage volumes ahead of time, create a pod that attaches to it, and then just kubectl exec into the pod vs. writing a long fiddly docker command line string (or crafting a docker-compose.yml). It's easy to adjust the pod as necessary while it runs too, like adding a service to expose ports without rerunning the container. But if you do like the idea of docker dev environemnts, check out a tool like batect: https://github.com/batect/batect https://github.com/batect/batect It's somewhat like if docker-compose had make-like commands you could define. Your whole dev environment and workflow can be defined in a simple yaml config that anyone can use.
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Check out k9s also, it’s much nicer to use than kubectl for edits and shells and things.
- kamac 5y ago
  Won’t setting up a k8s cluster require writing resource definitions? I imagine you’d need to write a statefulset. How’s that better than writing a docker-compose? I’m not sure how vscode does it, but it allows you to publish ports in real time as well.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    Nope you can make a simple pod definition and not worry about a deployment. For a local cluster you'll just have one node and everything is effectively a statefulset. IMHO it's easier to write k8s yaml, there's tons of tooling, clear schemas, etc. You could even script calling the API server directly.
eptcyka 5y ago
I find its easier to setup environments via Nix. Its no longer just a bunch of shell scripts.
- adamcstephens 5y ago
  What never been clear to me, is how does one pin a specific version in nix? For example, say I want python 3.9.2 exactly?
  - Shoue 5y ago
    You need to find the Nixpkgs GitHub commit with that specific version – in some cases it won't necessarily be in the binary cache so you have to compile it yourself because otherwise they'd have an insane amount more binaries to host. You can use Cachix to get your own binary cache (or alternatively just straight up host your own), and check out Niv if you want to make it easier to manage pinned Nixpkgs.
    - adamcstephens 5y ago
      Niv looks interesting, I’ll have to check it out. Trawling through git commits, hosting my own binary cache, these are all awful stories. Package versions are the normal pattern, and this lack of support for them in Nix has turned me off the two times I’ve explored using it. I kinda get why they aren’t supported, but it is a huge dissonance from the rest of the software world.
emptysongglass 5y ago
Why not just use Vagrant?
- nicolimo86 5y ago
  I use vagrant + ansible to configure my development environment. In the Vagrantfile I specify also the mount of the workspace containing my project. I then edit the code using vscode installed on the host (or vim from inside the box).
zubairq 5y ago
This is a very good idea to have the whole IDE as one docker container. We do this as well at Yazz: https://yazz.com/visifile/download.html https://yazz.com/visifile/download.html
amarant 5y ago
Personally I'd prefer going with NixOS to achieve the same result. that way you don't even need a docker installation. As a bonus you can actually install the Nix package manager on osx if you're not into Linux (and this way there is no need for virtualization if you're on a Mac) More info: https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/
- quarantine 5y ago
  As an added bonus, Nix can still easily output a container image for docker use containing the same shell environment.
- darkwater 5y ago
  So you just shifted your dependency from Docker to Nix. It might be more fun and an intetesting learning experience but also it's more complicated (or at least it's not that widely used like Docker is)
  - codethief 5y ago
    > So you just shifted your dependency from Docker to Nix OTOH you don't have to write all this boilerplate code that's suggested in the article and your Nix environment is truly reproducible, whereas rebuilding a Docker image might not reproduce it faithfully. (Try running `apt-get install` in a Ubuntu container without running `apt-get update` first.) On top of that, if you've ever had to use more than two languages (+ toolchains) inside a single project, maybe even on multiple architectures[0], you'll appreciate Nix taking care of the entire bootstrap procedure. [0]: Lots of dependencies that are easy to install on x86 need to be installed/compiled by hand on arm64.
  - amarant 5y ago
    Yes, learning nix is definitely an investment, but it's more powerful than docker, allowing you to create your entire setup, including drivers, desktop environment, and any userspace apps you might need, all declarative, and contained in a config file (or several if you prefer)
  - bachmeier 5y ago
turbinerneiter 5y ago
I'm currently testing fedora silverblue, which uses toolbox in a roughly similar way. https://github.com/containers/toolbox https://github.com/containers/toolbox One thing that bugs me is that I can't (or don't know how) get my current state into a Textfile, from which I can reproduce. It's also not fun for embedded development. Guess what, I need to access USB devices, serial, mass storage, hid - super annoying with this setup.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I actually do do this - https://github.com/mikadosoftware/workstation https://github.com/mikadosoftware/workstation I like the idea of using k8s as suggested upthread. I just have not had much time to push changes / work on it recently. One thing worth thinking about is i have moved to podman - seems a lot slower to start up but is user space which seems sensibke
domenkozar 5y ago
Tutorial on declarative and reproducible developer environments with Nix: https://nix.dev/tutorials/declarative-and-reproducible-developer-environments.html https://nix.dev/tutorials/declarative-and-reproducible-devel...
mark_and_sweep 5y ago
If you want to do this on Windows, I'd recommend giving https://scoop.sh https://scoop.sh a try.
sdfhbdf 5y ago
Hmm i don’t think you can compare IntelliJ which is a fully featured IDE with refractor functionalities, full text search, debugger and so on to a vim setup with plugins in docker container, just because they both edit text. This what the author did at the end of the write up. It’s like comparing jQuery to NodeJS, yeah they both generally are for JavaScript but serve a different purpose.
- egwor 5y ago
  The same concept still works; they could have installed IntelliJ and copied over all of the plugins and settings?
- kamac 5y ago
  I agree, the title of the article is a bit misleading. In general, you’d still need an IDE installed on the host machine, which can then connect to a runtime on the container. With VS Code and remote containers, it’s quite easy. Alternatively, maybe it’d be possible to have the container expose an IDE over http (possibly vscode through the browser?).
  - stult 5y ago
    VNC/RDP via Guacamole or some other VDI solution can provide this with relatively little effort. But it sort of defeats the point. Using your local IDE to connect to a container allows for a snappier, more responsive development experience than a VDI can provide. Plus remote containers is basically just ssh. So a lot less bandwidth and general overhead than a full on VDI solution, and you don't need to have a full VNC server set up on your containers.
- adriancr 5y ago
  vim, gdb, grep, cscope, ... Just because you are not familiar with his setup doesn't mean it's not at feature parity and more. Hell, he might even be running intellij in docker if he wishes. Saying this as I have a similar setup with emacs.
  - sdfhbdf 5y ago
3v1n0 5y ago
Using schroot for years here. Can do the same but having access to host easier and so to hw devices. Moving it around my config is easy as having dotfiles around
- eeZah7Ux 5y ago
  99% of the time a directory with your projects is all that you need. If you really need a "container", debootstrap + systemd-nspawn does the job and provides much better sandboxing with 10x less complexity. You don't need Docker or Nix.
yingliu4203 5y ago
anybody has experience with VS Code inside Container? the feature https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers looks nice.
alanbernstein 5y ago
When I run docker on my laptop, the fans turn on full speed and stay there (recent macbook pro). I kill docker any time I don't expect to use it in the next hour. If I'm not on AC power, it halves my battery life. I wouldn't even consider keeping docker running constantly. Is this not the normal experience?
- linkdd 5y ago
  Same here with Docker Desktop for Windows. Unless you have a Linux-based operating system, Docker behaves very poorly. NB: The Hyper-V backend behave a bit less poorly than the WSL backend. I've found that Docker Desktop uses a lot of Disk I/O whenever you use volumes, or pull an image, or anything else that touch the hard drive.

108 points by albertoCaroM 6y ago

"Choosing a base image can be quite daunting. I’m always a fan of Alpine Linux for my application containers, so that’s what I chose." Just be aware that means the musl libc, which is often fine, but not always. Software that expects glibc can crash or have unpredictable behavior. The JVM is a good example, unless you get a JVM that was originally built against musl. And sometimes also issues with busybox, where it differs from other implementations of the same tools.

IceWreck 5y ago
Yeah, this is why I use debian slim as an image for most projects unless I'm prioritizing small size. Its small and popular enough that a lot of other images already use it and chances are that you dont have to redownload it.
codethief 5y ago
Case in point: "Using Alpine can make Python Docker builds 50× slower", https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/
- williamjackson 5y ago
  That article should be titled, “Most Python packages do not upload an Alpine-compatible wheel to PyPI.” If you know where to find Alpine-compatible wheels, or host your own, Alpine has no build-speed penalty.
  - guitarbill 5y ago
    Where do you find Alpine-compatible wheels? Many ones uploaded to PyPI aren't, because e.g. both GitHub actions [0] and Azure pipelines [1] don't have Alpine images. Is it reasonable to expect maintainers of small, open-source libraries to write and maintain their own Alpine runners? I guess if you know your company's workflow depends on Alpine, you can build and cache them yourself. But the wider community doesn't benefit from that. [0] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runners/about-github-hosted-runners#supported-runners-and-hardware-resources https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runne... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml#software https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agen...
    - williamjackson 5y ago
      I was not aware of prior work so I maintain Alpine wheels for packages I use personally in a GitHub org. https://github.com/alpine-wheels/index https://github.com/alpine-wheels/index Besides my own needs, only one other person has requested additional packages, which I was happy to add. Maintenance is minimal, mostly just approving pull requests created by Dependabot.
      - guitarbill 5y ago
        That's pretty slick! Thanks
  - di 5y ago
    Exactly zero packages upload Alpine-compatible wheels to PyPI. The manylinux specification assumes glibc, so there is no valid distribution format which would allow the publication of non-glibc wheels. However there is an in-progress PEP to support it: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0656/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0656/
- angrais 5y ago
  I've used alpine images for python in production and not run into any of these issues. The key is to know how to use multistage builds to cache layers.

zby 5y ago

Can you run ansible or terraform inside a docker container? There are two parts of the dev environment - the programmer preferences and the project libraries and other infrastructure. What I would like is to have a way to compose those two and ideally something that would work the same way inside a docker container as in a full VM.

conradludgate 5y ago
Yes to terraform. We use it at our work to setup some dynamodb tables for testing locally. We mount the .terraform folder.
mrweasel 5y ago
I have a co-worker who had the idea of stuffing Ansible into a container. This would allow anyone to easily run any Ansible playbooks without having to deal with dependencies and versions. It’s absolutely terrible to use. You end up having wrapper scripts to make it even remotely usable. Mounting things in the right locations is a nightmare, even minor changes becomes a hassel. For Ansible, just learn to use virtualenvs. Terraform may be a little better.
- narism 5y ago
  We do the same thing but I wouldn’t call it a nightmare /hassle. It’s exactly one helper script to start up the container with the right volumes and a few aliases to make commands (ansible / ansible-playbook / etc) work seamlessly. Some good tips here: https://jonathan.bergknoff.com/journal/run-more-stuff-in-docker/ https://jonathan.bergknoff.com/journal/run-more-stuff-in-doc...
1MachineElf 5y ago
Nix and Guix are both answers to that combined need.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Grab the ansible-runner image from dockerhub and it's a great slimmed down image to run ansible: https://ansible-runner.readthedocs.io/en/stable/container.html https://ansible-runner.readthedocs.io/en/stable/container.ht... To provision stuff _inside_ your docker container from ansible I've found packer is the easiest way to do it: https://www.packer.io/docs/provisioners/ansible-local https://www.packer.io/docs/provisioners/ansible-local There was apparently a tool called ansible-bender that did something similar but was abandoned. Packer makes it easy to define a container that's provisioned with a local ansible playbook. Ultimately though I think using ansible with containers is a code smell. If you provision in a container with ansible you have to pull in an entire Python install, and that blows up your container size fast. You can do multi-stage builds and carefully extract the stuff you need but it's a real pain. IMHO minimal shell scripts that run in very tightly defined and controlled environments of the dockerfile (i.e. they don't have to be super flexible or support any and every system, just this container) are the way to go.

nyellin 5y ago

Cool stuff. A few months ago I looked into building a CITRIX alternative based on the idea that you would run application frontends in a local secure docker container while running the backend in the cloud. E.g. you could run VSCode locally while actually compiling in a kubernetes cluster. I eventually ruled out the idea for business reasons, but from a technical perspective it's doable and probably useful. At the time I thought the primary advantage would be reduced cloud costs and lower latency.

_ZeD_ 5y ago

if you want an OS as ide... wouldn't be easier to install emacs?

medstrom 5y ago
Until you reimplement every language as transpilers to elisp, that's not the same thing at all. In this respect, Emacs is actually in the same tool category as VSCode or Vim. As you'd set up Dev Containers in VSCode, you'd set up TRAMP in Emacs to ssh into a Docker environment, or (more likely for Emacsians I guess) access a Guix environment or Nix shell.

swym 5y ago

That is a nice write up. We use a very similar set up to containerise our embedded tool chains. Additionally, we use a wrapper script to symlink the current containerised project to the same location in the host system. This ensures, that outputs in the containerised environment points to valid paths in the host: E. g.: docker mount: /home/me/dev/proj1234 > /workspace symlink in host: ln -sfn /home/me/dev/proj1234 /workspace

chillpenguin 5y ago

I only get a new laptop once every several years. Doesn't really seem worth it to me personally. I also sort of like starting fresh in a way. Granted I have my dot-files on github to make that part easier. But I don't mind running the install command for things as they come up. I'm curious if there are other benefits to this approach though besides just saving time when setting up a new machine. The article mentioned "you end up with (in my opinion) a much more flexible working environment." Any ideas what they might mean?

spockz 5y ago
I now go a bit further. I used to keep my dot files around as well but last time I decided to go completely fresh and I learned about powerline10k (more performant than powerline9k) and sdkman (an installer for multiple and different sdk flavours) and had a nice evening to boot. If I hadn’t started over I would just have used the old config and not enjoyed the new benefits.
skrueger 5y ago
I think I share your line of thinking. What are the benefits? Are there down sides to being operating in the docker container for everything?
medstrom 5y ago
Reproducible dev environment. Easier to reproduce some bugs for fixing. More certainty that it doesn't just work on your laptop because you have an undocumented dependency installed. Easier to test the setup process on a clean machine and vary things about the machine setup. To test what happens if you have Python available system-wide vs. if you don't. More precise development history since you have docker-compose.yml under Git, making "time travel" easier. There's all kinds of little benefits that don't seem that important until you have use for them. Of course Guix and Nix go closer to being actually reproducible, but Docker is better than nothing.
- kamac 5y ago
  To add maybe one more point to this - it’s so much easier to run parts of the pipeline for devs who aren’t familiar with the environment. It can also serve as a documentation for what’s required to develop.

ximm 5y ago

Especially when doing IT support, having docker on the machines is rather unlikely. This sounds like a good usecase for appimages.

mintyc 5y ago

Update: The original post is from January 2019. Ashley Broadley's github page at https://github.com/ls12styler https://github.com/ls12styler sadly doesn't contain a repo with his rust dev work to date (I will ask him as it has some really good stuff in the article.) ---- Very nice. I'm doing similar at the moment. Maybe take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/mifrjj/what_extra_dev_tools_do_you_recommend/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/mifrjj/what_extra_dev... A list of useful cargo built in and third party sub commands. As you note, common recommended app crates (source) should be gathered separately. I have several other links and ideas eg supporting different targets such as x86_64-linux-unknown-musl but too long for this post!

de6u99er 5y ago

I run VSCode and Eclipse Theia in Docker containers and access them via browser. Depending on what I do I start either with a Java, Node, or Python container.

krisgenre 5y ago

Does anyone use docker for full-fledged development on OSX? I am a Linux user and tried setting up a dev environment for my colleagues on OSX but file system I/O was extremely slow and completely unusable.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
IIRC there are some mount options that might help if you search the docker docs, but for me I just create some local docker volumes to hold my code and mount those instead of mounting host folders. It feels a little weird and unnatural that your code is 'hidden' in docker's volume folder (under /var/lib/docker/volumes) in the VM instead of in a folder on your host machine. But it gets you into more of a mindset that this is just a temporary checkout and the real persistent home for the code is your source repository (github, etc.), so you don't let things linger without being checked into a branch somewhere.
karlshea 5y ago
Yes. Check out what ddev is doing, there’s some options for using NFS mounts that are acceptably fast.
kamac 5y ago
Yep, I use it. There are two tricks to mitigate this: 1. Using a :delegated or :cached flag when using a bind mount can speed it up a bit 2. For folders that need a lot of RW, but don’t need to be shared with the host (think node_modules or sbt cache), I bind a docker volume managed by docker-compose. This makes it extremely fast. Here's an example: https://gist.github.com/kamac/3fbb0548339655d37f3d786de19ae65b https://gist.github.com/kamac/3fbb0548339655d37f3d786de19ae6...
krisgenre 5y ago
Thanks for the tips guys. Will definitely try them out.
speedgoose 5y ago
Yes I do. I am trying to develop on OSX since a few days, using Docker. But between the low amount of ram on the laptop and the bad IOs performances I decided to give another try to Github Codespaces and I'm very pleasantly surprised. It feels fast enough and I can switch from computer without thinking about it.

adriancr 5y ago

Nice, similar thing to what I do, a few more things: 1. If you want X11 (haven't figured out audio yet) "-e DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix/:/tmp/.X11-unix:ro" 2. Firefox > --shm-size=2g and start with: firefox --no-remote 3. Entering container Just map a command to enter the container with the name as parameter / optional image type as second. That way you get a new fresh environment whenever you want Command would just start if it's not started or exec otherwise. I go extra length to have docker start up a ssh server inside container and I just ssh into it.

jraph 5y ago
For audio, maybe you can use pavucontrol on your host to make pulseaudio accept network connections, and then use PULSE_SERVER=your_host_ip command_which_plays_audio in the docker container? (I haven't tried it).
- fock 5y ago
  or better (because there's no nasty reachability from browsers or the net) just use an unix-domain-socket and bind mount that and the secret cookie to the container (I use that with bubblewrap for appimages)

qbasic_forever 5y ago

Go the next step and run a local kubernetes cluster with kind or k3s (it will take you 30 seconds to have a k8s cluster going). IMHO the kubectl CLI is a lot more logical than docker's CLI. You can create all your local storage volumes ahead of time, create a pod that attaches to it, and then just kubectl exec into the pod vs. writing a long fiddly docker command line string (or crafting a docker-compose.yml). It's easy to adjust the pod as necessary while it runs too, like adding a service to expose ports without rerunning the container. But if you do like the idea of docker dev environemnts, check out a tool like batect: https://github.com/batect/batect https://github.com/batect/batect It's somewhat like if docker-compose had make-like commands you could define. Your whole dev environment and workflow can be defined in a simple yaml config that anyone can use.

cyberpunk 5y ago
Check out k9s also, it’s much nicer to use than kubectl for edits and shells and things.
kamac 5y ago
Won’t setting up a k8s cluster require writing resource definitions? I imagine you’d need to write a statefulset. How’s that better than writing a docker-compose? I’m not sure how vscode does it, but it allows you to publish ports in real time as well.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Nope you can make a simple pod definition and not worry about a deployment. For a local cluster you'll just have one node and everything is effectively a statefulset. IMHO it's easier to write k8s yaml, there's tons of tooling, clear schemas, etc. You could even script calling the API server directly.

eptcyka 5y ago

I find its easier to setup environments via Nix. Its no longer just a bunch of shell scripts.

adamcstephens 5y ago
What never been clear to me, is how does one pin a specific version in nix? For example, say I want python 3.9.2 exactly?
- Shoue 5y ago
  You need to find the Nixpkgs GitHub commit with that specific version – in some cases it won't necessarily be in the binary cache so you have to compile it yourself because otherwise they'd have an insane amount more binaries to host. You can use Cachix to get your own binary cache (or alternatively just straight up host your own), and check out Niv if you want to make it easier to manage pinned Nixpkgs.
  - adamcstephens 5y ago
    Niv looks interesting, I’ll have to check it out. Trawling through git commits, hosting my own binary cache, these are all awful stories. Package versions are the normal pattern, and this lack of support for them in Nix has turned me off the two times I’ve explored using it. I kinda get why they aren’t supported, but it is a huge dissonance from the rest of the software world.

emptysongglass 5y ago

Why not just use Vagrant?

nicolimo86 5y ago
I use vagrant + ansible to configure my development environment. In the Vagrantfile I specify also the mount of the workspace containing my project. I then edit the code using vscode installed on the host (or vim from inside the box).

zubairq 5y ago

This is a very good idea to have the whole IDE as one docker container. We do this as well at Yazz: https://yazz.com/visifile/download.html https://yazz.com/visifile/download.html

amarant 5y ago

Personally I'd prefer going with NixOS to achieve the same result. that way you don't even need a docker installation. As a bonus you can actually install the Nix package manager on osx if you're not into Linux (and this way there is no need for virtualization if you're on a Mac) More info: https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/

quarantine 5y ago
As an added bonus, Nix can still easily output a container image for docker use containing the same shell environment.
darkwater 5y ago
So you just shifted your dependency from Docker to Nix. It might be more fun and an intetesting learning experience but also it's more complicated (or at least it's not that widely used like Docker is)
- codethief 5y ago
  > So you just shifted your dependency from Docker to Nix OTOH you don't have to write all this boilerplate code that's suggested in the article and your Nix environment is truly reproducible, whereas rebuilding a Docker image might not reproduce it faithfully. (Try running `apt-get install` in a Ubuntu container without running `apt-get update` first.) On top of that, if you've ever had to use more than two languages (+ toolchains) inside a single project, maybe even on multiple architectures[0], you'll appreciate Nix taking care of the entire bootstrap procedure. [0]: Lots of dependencies that are easy to install on x86 need to be installed/compiled by hand on arm64.
- amarant 5y ago
  Yes, learning nix is definitely an investment, but it's more powerful than docker, allowing you to create your entire setup, including drivers, desktop environment, and any userspace apps you might need, all declarative, and contained in a config file (or several if you prefer)
- bachmeier 5y ago

turbinerneiter 5y ago

I'm currently testing fedora silverblue, which uses toolbox in a roughly similar way. https://github.com/containers/toolbox https://github.com/containers/toolbox One thing that bugs me is that I can't (or don't know how) get my current state into a Textfile, from which I can reproduce. It's also not fun for embedded development. Guess what, I need to access USB devices, serial, mass storage, hid - super annoying with this setup.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

I actually do do this - https://github.com/mikadosoftware/workstation https://github.com/mikadosoftware/workstation I like the idea of using k8s as suggested upthread. I just have not had much time to push changes / work on it recently. One thing worth thinking about is i have moved to podman - seems a lot slower to start up but is user space which seems sensibke

domenkozar 5y ago

Tutorial on declarative and reproducible developer environments with Nix: https://nix.dev/tutorials/declarative-and-reproducible-developer-environments.html https://nix.dev/tutorials/declarative-and-reproducible-devel...

mark_and_sweep 5y ago

If you want to do this on Windows, I'd recommend giving https://scoop.sh https://scoop.sh a try.

sdfhbdf 5y ago

Hmm i don’t think you can compare IntelliJ which is a fully featured IDE with refractor functionalities, full text search, debugger and so on to a vim setup with plugins in docker container, just because they both edit text. This what the author did at the end of the write up. It’s like comparing jQuery to NodeJS, yeah they both generally are for JavaScript but serve a different purpose.

egwor 5y ago
The same concept still works; they could have installed IntelliJ and copied over all of the plugins and settings?
kamac 5y ago
I agree, the title of the article is a bit misleading. In general, you’d still need an IDE installed on the host machine, which can then connect to a runtime on the container. With VS Code and remote containers, it’s quite easy. Alternatively, maybe it’d be possible to have the container expose an IDE over http (possibly vscode through the browser?).
- stult 5y ago
  VNC/RDP via Guacamole or some other VDI solution can provide this with relatively little effort. But it sort of defeats the point. Using your local IDE to connect to a container allows for a snappier, more responsive development experience than a VDI can provide. Plus remote containers is basically just ssh. So a lot less bandwidth and general overhead than a full on VDI solution, and you don't need to have a full VNC server set up on your containers.
adriancr 5y ago
vim, gdb, grep, cscope, ... Just because you are not familiar with his setup doesn't mean it's not at feature parity and more. Hell, he might even be running intellij in docker if he wishes. Saying this as I have a similar setup with emacs.
- sdfhbdf 5y ago

3v1n0 5y ago

Using schroot for years here. Can do the same but having access to host easier and so to hw devices. Moving it around my config is easy as having dotfiles around

eeZah7Ux 5y ago
99% of the time a directory with your projects is all that you need. If you really need a "container", debootstrap + systemd-nspawn does the job and provides much better sandboxing with 10x less complexity. You don't need Docker or Nix.

yingliu4203 5y ago

anybody has experience with VS Code inside Container? the feature https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers looks nice.

alanbernstein 5y ago

When I run docker on my laptop, the fans turn on full speed and stay there (recent macbook pro). I kill docker any time I don't expect to use it in the next hour. If I'm not on AC power, it halves my battery life. I wouldn't even consider keeping docker running constantly. Is this not the normal experience?

linkdd 5y ago
Same here with Docker Desktop for Windows. Unless you have a Linux-based operating system, Docker behaves very poorly. NB: The Hyper-V backend behave a bit less poorly than the WSL backend. I've found that Docker Desktop uses a lot of Disk I/O whenever you use volumes, or pull an image, or anything else that touch the hard drive.