devenv

My development environment in Docker

Motivation

I love Docker; it's immutable, predictable, reproducible, and portable. Unfortunately development using Docker on macOS/Windows is a nightmare because bind mounts are notoriously slow. If you've every worked on a moderately-sized application using Docker you've felt this pain. I've tried everything from selective bind mounts, to NFS mounts, to docker-sync and nothing has quite worked the way I want it to.

So one day I decided to get rid of bind mounts completely by moving my entire development environment to Docker. This issues that exist in macOS/Windows don't apply to you if you do everything inside Docker's Linux VM.

Requirements

• Docker
• Git

Dev Tools

• git
• vim
• tig
• zsh
• oh-my-zsh

Usage

Clone the repo, docker-compose up

$ git clone [email protected]:jmera/devenv.git
# if you prefer HTTP: https://github.com/jmera/devenv.git
$ cd devenv
$ docker-compose up --detach

All work should go in your workspace (also the default working directory): /home/dev/workspace/. Changes made here will be persisted between runs in a volume named devenv_workspace.

Attach your local standard input/output/error streams to devenv. Create the directory where your project will live.

$ docker attach devenv
# Inside devenv, for example
➜ take my-app/
➜ git init # then hack away

After your are done with development, detach with <ctrl+p>,<ctrl+q>. <ctrl+c> will stop the container completely.

Working with an existing docker-compose.yml

If you have an existing Docker project you can easily expose a subdirectory of your workspace so your application can consume it. Create a docker-compose.override.yml to expose the volume your app will consume.

version: "3.7"
services:
  devenv:
    volumes:
      - my-app:/home/dev/workspace/my-app
      - /Users/jmera/.ssh:/home/dev/.ssh
    working_dir: /home/dev/workspace/my-app

volumes:
  my-app:

In the host machine, make sure to restart devenv. Also make sure permissions are set correctly. Lastly clone your repo.

$ docker-compose up -d
$ docker exec -u root devenv chown -R dev:dev /home/dev/workspace/my-app/
$ docker attach devenv
➜ git clone https://github.com/jmera/my-app.git # note change in working_dir

Update your application's docker-compose.yml or docker-compose.override.yml to consume that volume.

# ...
services:
  my-app:
    volumes:
      - devenv_my-app:/path/to/my-app
# ...
volumes:
  devenv_my-app: { external: true }

And remember to docker-compose up in that that project as well for changes to take effect

X11 (GUI) support 🚧

Things like copying to the clipboard and running a GUI application in devenv and using your host machine's display as the target is fairly straightforward but does require some configuration. In general, regardless of your OS the steps are as follows:

1. Install and start an X Server
2. Configure the X Server to allow connections from network clients
3. Add 127.0.0.1 (devenv) to the list of allowed hosts

Instructions for macOS

1. Install XQuartz and start it up. If you're using homebrew install GUI applications with brew cask.

$ brew cask install xquartz
$ launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/org.macosforge.xquartz.startx.plist

2. Launch XQuartz (open -a xquartz), open preferences (⌘,), select the "Security" tab and click the checkbox to configure XQuartz to allow connections from network clients.

3. Add 127.0.0.1 to the list of allowed hosts

$ xhost + 127.0.0.1

You can also add this line to your shell's .rc file. For example:

$ echo "xhost + 127.0.0.1" >> ~/.zshrc # or .bashrc depending on your setup

Examples

🚧