CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsdocker
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Reputation: 614

Using Docker container as a Ruby on Rails development environment

I want to use Docker as a development environment. I am familiar with the basic Docker concepts such as containers, images, volumes, etc. I am also reading this article.

  1. I think that there are already images specifically created for RoR development. Could someone recommend me a couple of images to start with?

  2. Suppose that I create a container, mount my working folder (RoR projects). Besides code writing, there are also command line jobs such as Linux tasks (update, install), Rails specific commands (Rake, migrations....). I may need to install new binaries or new gems, change Ruby version using rbenv. How can I accomplish these tasks under Docker? May I type a command in a console or ssh the container?

I managed to create an ubuntu container and run it as following:

docker run -it -v /Users/me/Documents/Projects:/var/source_files ubuntu

It creates a console for my container. Next I guess I can run commands like gem install, apt-get update and etc. Is this how we should configure our environment?

I cannot find information on how to run, how to maintain, how add/remove gems, etc.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 511

Answers (1)

odino
odino

Reputation: 1069

It's really up to you and what you're comfortable the most with. I'm assuming solo development on some kind of libraries rather than full-fledged apps[1].

I, for example, tend to use Makefiles when developing on specific Golang projects and have some separate images I tend to use for different occasions. For example, if I have to test a Python / Node scripts, I simply type play and I get into a silly container with a few dependencies pre-installed:

In my personal experience, though, I found that shell scripts / aliases work very well across projects, so I tend to have simple aliases that work on most projects. If I were you, for example, I would use a minimalistic approach and alias dev to docker run -ti -v $(pwd):/src $RUBY_IMAGE so that you can then run dev rake test, dev rails server etc etc from any project. Your $RUBY_IMAGE should have a few utilities installed (htop, curl and so on) and you should be good to go.

Again, I must stress on the fact that it really depends what you're comfortable with -- most of the times I'm extremely productive with just a Makefile.

[1] if working on full-fledged apps docker-compose works well for a lot of people and has a very good DX. minikube is a tool I'd recommend you to pick up only if you know how to work with kubernetes. We used docker-compose for a long time but have switched to minikube since a few months as it closely mirrors our production environment, and minikube works better (imho) when you have quite a few services talking to each other.

Upvotes: 1

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